Punishment may deter antisocial behavior. Yet to punish is costly, and the costs often do not offset the gains that are due to elevated levels of cooperation. However, the effectiveness of punishment depends not only on how costly it is, but also on the circumstances defining the social dilemma. Using the snowdrift game as the basis, we have conducted a series of economic experiments to determi...

Some readers will view the article by Lerman and Vorndran as controversial. It is a review of existing basic and applied research on punishment and a call for additional research on punishment. The thesis of my commentary is that the paper should not be viewed as controversial. Punishment happens. To ignore a natural phenomenon and its implications for a technology of behavior is akin to ignori...

The most famous element in Bentham’s theory of punishment, the Panopticon Prison, expresses his view of the two purposes of punishment, deterrence and special prevention. We investigate Bentham’s intuition in a public goods lab experiment by manipulating how much information on punishment experienced by others is available to would-be offenders. Compared with the tone that Jeremy Bentham set, o...

The expectation that non-cooperators will be punished can help to sustain cooperation, but there are competing claims about whether opportunities to engage in higher-order punishment (punishing punishment or failure to punish) help or undermine cooperation in social dilemmas. In a set of experimental treatments, we find that availability of higherorder punishment increases cooperation and effic...

The focus of this research is in the area of the United States death penalty. More specifically, it examines the use of the felony murder rule and the law of parties at both federal and state level. These areas are considered in light of the 8th Amendment as according to the interpretations of the United States Supreme Court. The approach taken in this article is two dimensional: firstly it con...

................................................................................................................................ iii Chapter One Introduction .......................................................................................................1 Chapter Two Legal History of Capital Punishment from Furman (1972) to McKoy (1990).......................................................

This paper reports an experiment which compares behaviour in two punishment regimes: (i) a standard public goods game with punishment in which subjects are given the opportunity to punish other group members (democratic punishment regime) and (ii) a public goods game environment where all group members exogenously experience an automatic reduction of their income (irrespective of their behaviou...

We study the effects of different punishment institutions on cooperation in a six-person prisoner's dilemma game in which actors observe others' cooperation with some noise (i.e. imperfect public monitoring). Previous research has shown that peer punishment can sustain cooperation, if a certain proportion of group members punish defectors at a cost to themselves. However, in the presence of noi...

It was proposed that people attribute an individual’s behavior more to internal factors when that individual’s actions are influenced by reward than when those actions are influenced by punishment. Previous research has failed to control for the power of reward versus punishment which, in effect, creates a confounding of behavioral base rates (consensus) with the reward-punishment manipulation....

OBJECTIVE The objective was to examine the roles of cognition and affect in maternal use of physical punishment. METHOD Through a review of the literature, distal and proximal predictors (cognitive and affective) of physical punishment use were identified. One hundred and ten mothers of 3-year-old children were interviewed regarding two disciplinary situations that occurred during the previou...