The DOI matches its Crossref record; 8 of the 8 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
An economic experiment reveals that humans prefer pool punishment to maintain the commons
Open accessAbstract
Punishment can stabilize costly cooperation and ensure the success of a common project that is threatened by free-riders. Punishment mechanisms can be classified into pool punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by a paid third party, (e.g. a police system or a sheriff), and peer punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by peers. Which punishment mechanism is preferred when both are concurrently available within a society? In an economic experiment, we show that the majority of subjects choose pool punishment, despite being costly even in the absence of defectors, when second-order free-riders, cooperators that do not punish, are also punished. Pool punishers are mutually enforcing their support for the punishment organization, stably trapping each other. Our experimental results show how organized punishment could have displaced individual punishment in human societies.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Altruistic punishment in humans
Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002) · Nature · doi:10.1038/415137a · Cited by 5,616
Antisocial Punishment Across Societies
Herrmann, B., Thöni, C., & Gächter, S. (2008) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1153808 · Cited by 2,038
Reputation helps solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’
Milinski, M., Semmann, D., & Krambeck, H.-J. (2002) · Nature · doi:10.1038/415424a · Cited by 1,371
Self-citationIndirect reciprocity can stabilize cooperation without the second-order free rider problem
Panchanathan, K., & Boyd, R. (2004) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature02978 · Cited by 865
Dreber, A., Rand, D. G., Fudenberg, D., & Nowak, M. A. (2008) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature06723 · Cited by 718
Coordinated Punishment of Defectors Sustains Cooperation and Can Proliferate When Rare
Boyd, R., Gintis, H., & Bowles, S. (2010) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1183665 · Cited by 613
Social learning promotes institutions for governing the commons
Sigmund, K., De Silva, H., Traulsen, A., & Hauert, C. (2010) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature09203 · Cited by 580
Self-citationSigmund, K. (2010) · doi:10.1515/9781400832255 · Cited by 570
Cited by
Statistical physics of human cooperation
Perc, M., Jordan, J. J., Rand, D. G., Wang, Z., Boccaletti, S., & Szolnoki, A. (2017) · Physics Reports · doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2017.05.004 · Cited by 1,590
Normative foundations of human cooperation
Fehr, E., & Schurtenberger, I. (2018) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0385-5 · Cited by 434
Probabilistic sharing solves the problem of costly punishment
Chen, X., Szolnoki, A., & Perc, M. (2014) · New Journal of Physics · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/16/8/083016 · Cited by 285
A bottom-up institutional approach to cooperative governance of risky commons
Vasconcelos, V. V., Santos, F. C., & Pacheco, J. M. (2013) · Nature Climate Change · doi:10.1038/nclimate1927 · Cited by 183
Effectiveness of conditional punishment for the evolution of public cooperation
Szolnoki, A., & Perc, M. (2013) · Journal of Theoretical Biology · doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2013.02.008 · Cited by 173
Metadata
- Authors
- Traulsen, A., Röhl, T., & Milinski, M.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2012-07-01
- Volume
- 279
- Issue
- 1743
- Pages
- 3716-3721
- ISSN
- 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
- 0962-8452
- 1471-2954
- OpenAlex
- W2137421683
- Cited by
- 162
- References
- 8
- FWCI
- 38.46
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An economic experiment reveals that humans prefer pool punishment to maintain the commons. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rspb.2012.0937
- The paper
- Traulsen, A., Röhl, T., & Milinski, M. (2012). An economic experiment reveals that humans prefer pool punishment to maintain the commons. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.0937
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
