Rules, cooperation and punishment: rules in repeated public goods games
Publication Date
December 11, 2025
Creator
Abstract
The tendency for people to follow arbitrary rules, even when costly, has been repeatedly demonstrated in experimental economics. Rule following has been proposed as a key reason why humans are capable of sustaining long-term cooperation. However, the mechanisms by which rule-following leads to cooperation are not well understood. This paper aims to shed light on how rules govern cooperation by studying a repeated public goods game with an explicit rule prescribing contributions go to the shared public good, compared to when the rule is absent. Moreover, treatments with peer punishment are also considered, as punishment has been proposed as a crucial element for long-run cooperation. The motivation is that such a design will be able to shed light on how a rule governs behaviour in repeated interactions: for example, how social expectations are shaped by rules, how individuals of different rule-following propensities change their behaviour in the presence of one another, and how the efficacy of punishment is altered when a rule is present.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
MRes
Supervisors
Subjects (LC)
Associated Schools / Departments
School of Economics (UK)
eprints ID
81895
UoN Repository URI
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Roycroft-SherryJack_20239980_first-1.pdf
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