Shifting Punishment on Minorities: Experimental Evidence of Scapegoating

Punishment strategies in repeated games: Evidence from experimental markets

An experiment is designed to test the implications of the equilibria typically studied in the repeated game literature (i.e. those based on Nash reversion and optimal symmetric two-phase punishment strategies). One hundred pairs of subjects repeatedly set prices in a differentiated demand duopoly setting. Unlike existing experiments there was no fixed end date or time constraint (some pairs pla...

Certainty of Punishment versus Severity of Punishment: An Experimental Investigation

Compliance with laws and regulations depends on the expected penalty facing violators. The expected penalty depends on both the probability of punishment and the severity of the punishment if caught. A key question in the economics of crime literature is whether increasing the probability of punishment is a more effective deterrent than an equivalent increase in the severity of punishment. This...

No More Scapegoating

Behavioral software contracts supplement interface information with logical assertions. A rigorous enforcement of contracts provides useful feedback to developers if it signals contract violations as soon as they occur and if it assigns blame to violators with precise explanations. Correct blame assignment gets programmers started with the debugging process and can significantly decrease the ti...

The People’s Republic of China and its National Minorities: A Focus on Shifting Policies

Scapegoating and Leader Behavior