The discovery of the altruistic punishment mechanism as a replicable experimental result is a genuine achievement of behavioural economics. The hypothesis that cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies is sustained by altruistic punishment is a scientifically legitimate conjecture, but it must be tested against real-world observations. Guala's doubts about the evidential support for this hypothesis are well founded.

The standard theories of cooperation in humans, which depend on repeated interaction and reputation effects among self-regarding agents, are inadequate. Strong reciprocity, a predisposition to participate in costly cooperation and the punishment, fosters cooperation where self-regarding behaviors fail. The effectiveness of socially coordinated punishment depends on individual motivations to participate, which are based on strong reciprocity motives. The relative infrequency of high-cost punishment is a result of the ubiquity of strong reciprocity, not its absence.

We study experimentally in the laboratory the situation when individuals have to report their private information about a variable to a public authority that then makes inference about the true values given a known variable using a regression technique. It is assumed that individuals prefer this predicted value to be as close as possible to their true value. Consistent with the theoretical literature, we show that subjects misrepresent their private information more when an ordinary least squares regression is implemented than (...) when the so-called resistant line estimator is employed. The latter extends the median voter theorem to the two-dimensional setting and belongs to the family of robust estimation techniques. In fact, we find that OLS involves serious biases but the RL estimation is empirically unbiased. Furthermore, subjects never earn less when the RL is applied. (shrink)

Using information on students’ past participation in economic experiments, we analyze whether behavior in public goods games is affected by experience and history. We find that: on average, the amount subjects contribute and expect others to contribute decreases with experience; at the individual level, the proportion of unconditional cooperators decreases with experience, while the proportion of selfish people increases. Finally, history influences behavior less than experience. Researchers are urged to control for subjects’ experience and history to improve the external validity (...) and replicability of results. (shrink)

In a series of one-shot linear public goods game, we ask subjects to report their contributions, their contribution plans for the next period, and their first-order beliefs about their present and future partner. We estimate subjects’ preferences from plan data by a finite mixture approach and compare the results with those obtained from contribution data. Controlling for beliefs, which incorporate the information about the others’ decisions, we are able to show that plans convey accurate information about subjects’ preferences and, consequently, (...) are good predictors of their future behavior. (shrink)

Experimental studies on punishment have sometimes been over-interpreted not only for the reasons Guala lists, but also because of a frequent conflation of proximate and ultimate explanatory levels that Guala's review perpetuates. Moreover, for future analyses we may need a clearer classification of different kinds of punishment.

Economic research suggests that, in some circumstances, exogenously restricting the information leaders can provide to followers can overcome the free-riding problem and coordination failures, and improve efficiency in collective actions. The reason is that a leader’s information advantage can deprive followers of the information necessary for profitable defection. In this paper, we focus on situations where the decision to restrict access to information is an endogenous choice made by the leader. We experimentally investigate if leaders choose to strategically withhold information (...) when appropriate to improve outcomes. To address this question, we adopt a single-shot collective action game in which a leader–follower setting with information advantage for the leader can potentially solve the free-riding problem and coordination failures. Our results suggest that leaders, in many circumstances, fail to utilize their information advantage to improve efficiency. This implies that groups may benefit if a nontransparent information regime is exogenously imposed on them. (shrink)

The article analyses experimental “solidarity games” with two benefactors and one beneficiary. Depending on their motive for giving—e.g., warm glow, altruism, or guilt—the benefactors’ response functions are either constant, decreasing, or increasing. If motives interact, or if envy is a concern, then more complex (unimodal) shapes may emerge. Controlling for random utility perturbations, we determine which and how many motives affect individual decision making. The main findings are that the motives of about 75% of the subjects can be identified fairly (...) sharply, that all of the motives discussed in the literature co-exist in the population, and that for any given individual no more than two motives (out of six motives considered overall) are identified. We conclude that a unifying motive for solidarity cannot be derived even when we allow for individually heterogeneous parameterization: different subjects give for different reasons and all existing social preference theories are partially correct. (shrink)