Punishment as a mechanism to maintain bilateral cooperation: A social behavior experiment

We designed 3 social behavior experiments involving compensation for real estate expropriation. We recruited 88 students at a university in China as our participants, and investigated the impact of third-party punishment on bilateral cooperation in a laboratory setting. The results showed the heterogeneity of human behavior in the different experiment types. In addition, results showed that the potential impact of punishment became more powerful by adding a third party. Finally, a third party had low punishment costs and a significantly higher probability of actually imposing punishment than did a second party. Results showed that, compared with second-party punishment, third-party punishment is more conducive to the maintenance of bilateral cooperation.