Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/163013 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
CeDEx Discussion Paper Series No. 2016-12
Publisher: 
The University of Nottingham, Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx), Nottingham
Abstract: 
We study information conditions under which individuals are willing to delegate their sanctioning power to a central authority. We design a public goods game in which players can move between institutional environments, and we vary the observability of others' contributions. We find that the relative popularity of centralized sanctioning crucially depends on the interaction between the observability of the cooperation of others and the absence of punishment targeted at cooperative individuals. While central institutions do not outperform decentralized sanctions under perfect information, large parts of the population are attracted by central institutions that rarely punish cooperative individuals in environments with limited observability.
Subjects: 
centralized sanctions
cooperation
experiment
endogenous institutions
JEL: 
C92
D02
H41
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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