Group Membership, Competition, and Altruistic versus Antisocial Punishment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Army Groups

Lorenz Goette, David Huffman, Stephan Meier and Matthias Sutter ()

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: We investigate how group boundaries, and the economic environment surrounding groups, affect altruistic cooperation and punishment behavior. Our study uses experiments conducted with 525 officers in the Swiss Army, and exploits random assignment to platoons. We find that, without competition between groups, individuals are more prone to cooperate altruistically in a prisoner's dilemma game with in-group as opposed to out-group members. They also use a costly punishment option to selectively harm those who defect, encouraging a norm of cooperation towards the group. Adding competition between groups causes even stronger in-group cooperation, but also a qualitative change in punishment: punishment becomes anti-social, harming cooperative and defecting out-group members alike. These findings support recent evolutionary models and have important organizational implications.

Keywords: Cooperation; Punishment; Army; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55
Date: 2010-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Group Membership, Competition, and Altruistic versus Antisocial Punishment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Army Groups (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inn:wpaper:2010-24

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