Emotions, Sanctions and Cooperation We use skin conductance responses and self-reports of hedonic valence to study the emotional basis of cooperation and punishment in a social dilemma. Emotional reaction to free-riding incites individuals to apply sanctions when they are available. The application of sanctions activates a “virtuous emotional circle” that accompanies cooperation. Emotionally ar...

In this paper, I construct a simple model that illustrates conditions under which increased criminal sanctions can lead to increased levels of crime. This finding is derived from the interaction of binding budgetary constraints and plea bargaining, given that the costs of trial are assumed to be increasing in the size of sanction. In an environment with these institutional features, maximal san...

Underpinned by the assumption that unemployed persons are passive recipients of social security, recent welfare reforms have increased benefit conditionality in the UK and introduced harsher penalties for failure to meet these conditions. Yet, conditionality may result in vulnerable groups disproportionately experiencing disentitlement from benefits, one of the rights of social citizenship, bec...

This paper describes a field study to investigate whether and to what extent individuals conserve more electricity if they have the opportunity to signal their behavior to others in the online community. Moreover, the study intends to reveal how positive social sanctions (e.g., publicly rewarding people who reduce their energy consumption) and negative social sanctions (e.g., publicly warning p...

All known human societies have maintained social order by enforcing compliance with social norms. The biological mechanisms underlying norm compliance are, however, hardly understood. We show that the right lateral prefrontal cortex (rLPFC) is involved in both voluntary and sanction-induced norm compliance. Both types of compliance could be changed by varying the neural excitability of this bra...

Rents tend to be relatively high in developing countries and also very fungible, so that differences in the scale of the rent and in its distribution among economic agents profoundly affect the nature of the political state and the development trajectory. This paper identifies two basic trajectories to a high-income democracy linked to the scale and deployment of rents. Low-rent countries tend ...

Sanctions are used ubiquitously to enforce obedience to social norms. However, recent field studies and laboratory experiments have demonstrated that cooperation is sometimes reduced when incentives meant to promote prosocial decisions are added to the environment. Although various explanations for this effect have been suggested, the neural foundations of the effect have not been fully explore...

This paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western Kenya. The identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement. Ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities, and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance. The theoretical model illustrat...

Social sanctions may be a strong deterrent of crime. This paper presents a formal model that relates crime and social sanction to social interaction density. We empirically test the theoretical predictions using a provincial level panel dataset on different crimes in Italy between 1996 and 2003. We exploit detailed demographic and geo-morphological information to develop exogenous measures of s...