We provide lab data from four different games that allow us to study whether people have accurate expectations regarding monetary sanctions (punishment/reward) and non-monetary sanctions (disapproval/approval). Although the strength of the sanction is always predicted with some error (particularly in the case of monetary sanctions), we observe that (i) most subjects anticipate correctly the sig...

Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human rights of both their compatriots or outsiders. Faced with this depressing catalogue of abuses, the international community’s response of choice consists in imposing economic sanctions on wrongdoers. The relatively scant philosophical literature on the topic tackles primary sanctions where the sanctioning...

the imposition of comprehensive sanctions by targeting the whole population in a sanctioned state causes a wide range of problems for the people and particularly the weak groups of society. to limit the time and the scope of sanctions is a method to reduce negative consequences of sanctions, specifically comprehensive ones. in other words, determining time limits as well as objective and subjec...

In this paper, we compare the cause and effect of immaterial rewards and sanctions on cooperation in a voluntary contributions experiment. We find that both rewards and sanctions increase contributions only when subjects interact repeatedly, though rewards seem to be more effective than sanctions. Moreover, in contrast to sanctions, rewards do have an impact on future contributions. Although th...

The legume-rhizobium symbiosis is an ideal model for studying the factors that limit the evolution of microbial mutualists into parasites. Legumes are unable to consistently recognize parasitic rhizobia that, once established inside plant cells, use plant resources for their own reproduction rather than for N2 fixation. Evolution of parasitism in rhizobia, driven partly by competition among mul...

A long-lived firm sells a good to a sequence of consumers, where the good’s quality imperfectly depends on the firm’s unobservable e§ort. To solve the moral hazard problem, the firm can promise to pay damages (formal sanctions) or facilitate reputational punishment (informal sanctions). Formal sanctions engender litigation costs and possible court error while informal sanctions involve ine¢cien...

John Austin famously claimed that the idea of sanctions is “the key to the science of jurisprudence.” Thus, he held legal rules to be threats backed by sanctions and statements of legal obligations as predictions that the threatened sanctions will be carried out. And before The Concept of Law was published in 1961, the concept of sanctions was central to every other positivistic theory of law a...

Cooperation among nonrelatives can be puzzling because cooperation often involves incurring costs to confer benefits on unrelated others. Punishment of noncooperators can sustain otherwise fragile cooperation, but the provision of punishment suffers from a "second-order" free-riding problem because nonpunishers can free ride on the benefits from costly punishment provided by others. One suggest...

In this paper we investigate two important and related aspects of the formalization of open interaction systems: how to specify norms, and how to enforce them by means of sanctions. The problem of specifying the sanctions associated to the violation of norms is crucial in an open system because, given that the compliance of autonomous agents to obligations and prohibitions cannot be taken for g...

Imposed Benefit Sanctions and the Unemployment-toEmployment Transition: The German Experience We analyze the effect of imposed benefit sanctions on the unemployment-to-employment transition of unemployed people entitled to unemployment compensation on the basis of register data from the German Federal Employment Agency. We combine propensity score matching with a discrete-time hazard rate model...