The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions revisited: A multilab replication

Abstract

Abstract Is peer sanctioning a sustainable solution to the problem of human cooperation? We conducted an exact multilab replication (N = 1,008; 7 labs × 12 groups × 12 participants) of an experiment by Gürerk, Irlenbusch, and Rockenbach published in Science in 2006 (Gürerk Ö, Irlenbusch B, Rockenbach B. The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions. 2006. Science. 312(5770):108–111). In GIR2006 (N = 84; 1 lab × 7 groups × 12 participants), groups that allowed members to reward cooperators and punish defectors were found to outgrow and outperform groups without a peer-sanctioning institution. We find GIR2006 replicated in accordance with all preregistered replication criteria in five of the seven labs we sampled. There, the majority of participants joined groups with a sanctioning institution, and participants cooperated and profited more on average than in groups without a sanctioning institution. In the two other labs, results were weaker but still favored sanctioning institutions. These findings establish the competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions as a robust phenomenon within the European context.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.