Legitimate Punishment, Immunity, and the Enforcement of Cooperation

In the framework of a finitely repeated public goods game with costly punishment options, we introduce a novel restrictive setup where a principle of legitimacy holds, in the sense that only virtuous behavior (that is, being a high contributor) allows one to gain access to sanctioning opportunities (‘entitlement’) and only wrongful behavior (that is, being a low contributor) makes one a potential target of peer punishment (‘desert’). As a consequence, acting virtuously guarantees that it will not be possible to be punished by less virtuous subjects (‘immunity’). These restrictions, by allowing for ‘legitimate punishment’ only, rule out by construction so called antisocial punishment as well as vengeful behavior. Moreover, we manipulate the amount of information over others’ contributions that subjects receive before making their punishment decisions. Our preliminary results show that restrictions per se do not affect the cooperation levels; by contrast, virtuous restrictions combined with feedback on virtuous peers significantly increase contribution levels and make cooperation sustainable over time. JEL Classification: C72; C91; C92; D23 ; D72.