第三方的惩罚需求:一个实验研究

The Demand for the Third Party Punishment: An Experimental Examination

第三方惩罚对于社会规范的维持至关重要。本文基于一组引入真实劳动(real effort)和第三方的独裁者博弈实验,探讨了由利益无关的第三方实施的惩罚背后隐藏的经济逻辑。本文研究的问题是,利益无关的第三方对惩罚的需求是否敏感反应于惩罚价格?本文通过操控实验中独裁者做出分配决策后第三方面对的惩罚价格检验了这一点。结果发现,第三方确实愿意花费成本惩罚违背潜在规范的独裁者。第三方对惩罚的这种需求一方面随着惩罚价格的上升而下降,另一方面随着独裁者规范违背程度的增加而增加。通过引出接受者关于第三方在给定惩罚价格水平下是否会实施惩罚的信念,本文证明了这种动机模式的普遍性。本文的结论是,即便利益无关,第三方惩罚这种看似纯粹利他的行为背后也存在很强的经济考虑。这意味着,我们在构建有关惩罚的微观行为模型进而进行相应的制度设计时必须同时考虑这两个方面。

Third party punishment is regarded as an essential to the maintenance of social norms. We examine the economic logic underlying third party punishment in a Dictator Game within a real effort context in which dictator allocates the outputs of both first party and second party. The question is whether the demand of third party punishment obeys the Law of Demand. We varied the price of punishment faced by the third parties after the dictators made their allocation decisions in a series of experiments. The results show that the third parties are willing to use the costly punishment opportunities. Besides, the level of punishment, on the one hand, is significantly negatively related to the level of price, suggesting punishment is an ordinary good, and on the other hand, is also determined by the extent to which the dictator＇s distribution of outputs to himself/herself exceeds his/her own output. We further confirm the generality of such relationships by inducing believes of the second parties on whether the third party would punish dictators in a given price level or not. These results show that, there are two kinds of forces underlying third party punishment, namely, economic force and non- economic force. We should consider them both when we construct the behavioral models of punishment decision.