The paper “Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments” by Fehr and Gächter from 1999 was a milestone for the change of RCT from its orthodox versions to the adoption of elements from non-economic fields. Main result of the experiment was that in a public good situation subjects not only started with a contribution rate of about 50 %, but that with announcing the opportunity to punish free riders alone already, contributions made a strong jump upwards and converged to nearly 100 % in the following rounds – although punishment was expensive for punishers and should not occur for selfish rational actors.
The contribution investigates the scope of possible explanations for the observed patterns in the F&G-experiments by Rational Choice Theory (RCT) extended by motives of reciprocity, with the model of frame selection (MFS). MFS refers to processes of cognitive activation of specific types of “definition of the situation” (Esser and Kronberg 2015). Main result is that most findings can be reconstructed rather easily by means of both approaches – with one exception: After starting with punishment and after withdrawal of this option after 10 rounds subjects should following RCT react immediately with at least some defection, following MFS, however, with keeping a high level of cooperation, independently of motives of subjects.
An independent empirical test with data also from other experiments (Hermann et al. 2008) showed exactly this: no change in cooperation, not even by egoists. Alternative RCT-explanations aiming to find cooperative equilibria for keeping cooperation unchanged by egoists could be the assumption of reputation-effects in finite iterated games. This interpretation, however, seems to be not plausible: F&G tried to control explicitly for reputation effects for all versions, and at least for the stranger-version this attempts should have been successful. The effect, however, appeared in both versions, and for the stranger-version of the data set by Hermann et al. even stronger than in the original experiment.
Fehr, E., and S. Gächter. 1999. Cooperation in Public Goods Experiments. Working Paper No. 10. Institute for Empirical Research in Economics. University of Zürich.
Esser, H., and C. Kroneberg. 2015: Towards an Integrative Theory of Action: The Model of Frame Selection. S. 63–85 in: E. L., Sh. Thye and J. Yoon (Eds.), Order on the Edge of Chaos: Social Psychology and the Problem of Social Order. Cambridge, Mass.: CUP.
Hermann, B., Ch. Thöni and S. Gächter. 2008. Antisocial Punishment Across Societies. Science 319: 1362–1367.