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Punishment institutions are a major guarantor of prosocial behavior. At the same time, their asymmetrical power structure may lead to antisocial behavior itself. We investigate power abuse, understood as the use of power for personal gain, of a single punisher in a public-goods game subject to variations in punishment power and contribution transparency. Using a laboratory experiment we find a high amount of abuse across all conditions. More power led to more abuse over time, while transparency could only curb abuse in the high power conditions. These findings highlight the dangers of power centralization but suggest a more complex relation of power and transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use an experiment to compare a theory of risk-aversion and a theory of spite as an explanation for overbidding in auctions. As a workhorse we use the second-price all-pay auction. Both risk and spite are used to rationalize deviations from risk-neutral equilibrium bids. We exploit that equilibrium predictions in the second-price all-pay auctions for spite are different than those for risk-aversion. We find that spite is a convincing explanation for bidding behavior for the second-price all-pay auction. Not only can spite rationalize observed bids, also our measure for spite is consistent with observed bids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how punishment influences conditional cooperation. We ask two questions: (1) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject can be punished and (2) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject has the power to punish others. In particular, we disentangle the decision to be a conditional cooperator at all from the strength of conditional cooperation. We find that the possibility of being punished increases the strength of conditional cooperation. At the same time the possibility of being punished increases the number of free riders. In our study the net effect on cooperation still is positive. The possibility of punishing others has two effects: Substitution and responsibility. Players substitute conditional cooperation with punishment which leads to a decrease in conditional cooperation. The power to punish means more responsibility which leads to an increase in conditional cooperation. In our design the overall effect of responsibility is stronger than the effect of substitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who benefits from the ignorance of others? We address this question from the point of view of a policy maker who can induce some ignorance into a system of agents competing for resources. Evolutionary game theory shows that when unconditional cooperators or ignorant agents compete with defectors in two-strategy settings, unconditional cooperators get exploited and are rendered extinct. In contrast, conditional cooperators, by utilizing some kind of reciprocity, are able to survive and sustain cooperation when competing with defectors. We study how cooperation thrives in a three-strategy setting where there are unconditional cooperators, conditional cooperators and defectors. By means of simulation on various kinds of graphs, we show that conditional cooperators benefit from the existence of unconditional cooperators in the majority of cases. However, in worlds that make cooperation hard to evolve, defectors benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]