Punishment

Punishment

Experimental literature provides abundant evidence on the willingness of individuals to take costly action to affect others, even if such yield no future benefits. The phenomenon is robust for changes in experimental settings and has been replicated numerous times. For example, some papers report about rejections of strictly positive offers in the Ultimatum game that result in both participants receiving nothing (\cite{gut1982}, \cite{bin1985}, \cite{rot1991}, \cite{for1994}, \cite{bol1995}, \cite{sch1996}, \cite{oos2004} and others). Others showed that in the public goods game participants assign costly punishment points despite the anonymity of interactions and lack of potential future gains, either due to zero probability for a rematch ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...It fulfills two purposes: 1) alteration of the distribution of resources possessed by the parties 2) informing the targeted party about the inflicted damage. Which of the two is valued by the penalizing individuals is an open question, which attracted some attention from psychologists, who offer two hypothesis. According to \cite{fri1994} and \cite{hei2013} it is the former that is essential, as the primary motivation of the punishers is ``pain equalization''. \cite{fr2001} suggests that without the awareness of the punished, punishment has no value to the individual administering it.
The hypotheses were tested by \cite{gol2009}, who allege that punishment is only satisfactory if conducted by the injured, as opposed to a penalty by fate, and just if a transgressor understands the reasons for being punished. The authors conclude that retribution serves to convey a message, not to equalize pain. Their conclusion is mostly supported by \cite{gol2011}. Both \cite{gol2009} and \cite{gol2011} used techniques popular with psychologists, such as a lexical decision task and self–reported satisfaction from punishment, to learn about post hoc satisfaction of the injured party from the retribution. Therefore, the preferences in the two studies are measured indirectly, rather than by observing their choices.
A more common approach for economists, based on the principle of revealed

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