Research informed by sociological neoinstitutionalism often frames organizational reactions to legal norms as either loose coupling, where formal legal commitments are only weakly aligned with actual practices, or tight coupling, where strong internal or external compliance pressures drive close alignment. This article introduces a third pattern – contentious coupling – where some organizational members attempt to realign practices with legal commitments, but these very efforts provoke pushback from others, resulting in substantive yet constrained success. This paradox is key to understanding the widespread yet limited effects of legal rights. I illustrate contentious coupling by examining how international human rights law has shaped solitary confinement reform in Taiwan. While hierarchical enforcement led by rights advocates and policymakers has successfully reduced prolonged solitary confinement, it has also alienated frontline correctional officers by triggering a sense of relative deprivation and perception of hypocrisy, encapsulated in their complaints of a “human rights upsurge.” In response, these officers engage in two forms of passive resistance – formalistic care and resistance spillover – both of which undermine the authority of human rights and hinder their capacity to transform correctional culture.

Despite large-scale racial inequalities across multiple social domains, racial innocence highlights the complacency of the law and social science research in denying racial power through race neutral assumptions. We explore three theoretical and methodological mechanisms maintaining racial innocence within quantitative social science: treating unequal structural conditions and organizational practices as impartial, isolating samples to reflect limited stages, and focusing on individual levels of analysis. Given that mass incarceration is one of the most visible modern-day exemplars of racial subordination in the United States, we use the example of incarceration sentencing to highlight these mechanisms. Using case processing data from Miami-Dade County between 2012 and 2015 (N = 86,340), we first examine racial inequality in incarceration sentencing when treating unequal case characteristics impartially across racial groups relative to when we allow case characteristics to be unequal across racial groups. Second, we examine racial inequality when isolating limited samples with narrow decision points relative to when we draw from samples across multiple stages. Finally, we examine racial inequality with individual-level frameworks relative to a neighborhood level frameworks. In this case, racial inequalities in incarceration sentencing with a racially consciousness approach are twice as large than with a racially innocent one.

In this paper, the strategy method's impact on behavior in sequential bargaining games is investigated. Besides the decision procedure (hot versus cold), we varied the second mover punishment costs (high versus low). Significant impacts of both treatment variables were observed. For example, second movers punished significantly more often in the hot version of the low cost game. Furthermore, first mover behavior was significantly different in the hot and cold versions of both games. In the hot games, first mover behavior suggests an expectation of decreased rewards and/or punishments from second movers. We observed, however, no decrease in reward and an increase in punishment. The hot cold variable only informs first movers that the decision procedure used by second movers has changed. Therefore, first mover behavior must be shaped by their perceived assessment concerning how second movers make decisions. We argue that first mover behavior can be explained by the interaction of two well-known psychological effects: the consensus and positive self-image effects.

A vast amount of empirical and theoretical research on public good games indicates that the threat of punishment can curb free-riding in human groups engaged in joint enterprises. Since punishment is often costly, however, this raises an issue of second-order free-riding: indeed, the sanctioning system itself is a common good which can be exploited. Most investigations, so far, considered peer punishment: players could impose fines on those who exploited them, at a cost to themselves. Only a minority considered so-called pool punishment. In this scenario, players contribute to a punishment pool before engaging in the joint enterprise, and without knowing who the free-riders will be. Theoretical investigations (Sigmund et al., Nature 466:861–863, 2010) have shown that peer punishment is more efficient, but pool punishment more stable. Social learning, i.e., the preferential imitation of successful strategies, should lead to pool punishment if sanctions are also imposed on second-order free-riders, but to peer punishment if they are not. Here we describe an economic experiment (the Mutual Aid game) which tests this prediction. We find that pool punishment only emerges if second-order free riders are punished, but that peer punishment is more stable than expected. Basically, our experiment shows that social learning can lead to a spontaneously emerging social contract, based on a sanctioning institution to overcome the free rider problem.

This paper introduces new experimental designs to examine how conditional cooperation and punishment behaviours respond to the full range of variation in the contributions of others. It is shown that contributions become significantly more selfish-biased as others contribute more unequally, while punishment increases both with decreasing contributions by the target player and increasing contributions by a third player. Low contributors who punish antisocially do not direct their punishment specifically toward high contributors, while their beliefs indicate that they expect to themselves be punished.

We investigate the endogenous formation of sanctioning institutions supposed to improve efficiency in the voluntary provision of public goods. Our paper parallels Markussen et al. (Rev Econ Stud 81:301–324, 2014) in that our experimental subjects vote over formal versus informal sanctions, but it goes beyond that paper by endogenizing the formal sanction scheme. We find that self-determined formal sanctions schemes are popular and efficient when they carry no up-front cost, but as in Markussen et al. informal sanctions are more popular and efficient than formal sanctions when adopting the latter entails such a cost. Practice improves the performance of sanction schemes: they become more targeted and deterrent with learning. Voters’ characteristics, including their tendency to engage in perverse informal sanctioning, help to predict individual voting.

Punishment has been shown to be an effective reinforcement mechanism. Intentional or not, punishment will likely generate spillover effects that extend beyond one’s immediate decision environment, and these spillovers are not as well understood. We seek to understand these secondary spillover effects in a controlled lab setting using a standard social dilemma: the voluntary contributions mechanism. We find that spillovers occur when others observe punishment outside their own social dilemma. However, the direction of the spillover effect depends crucially on personal punishment history and whether one is personally exempt from punishment or not.

We experimentally investigate the relationship between (un)kind actions and subsequent deception in a two-player, two-stage game. The first stage involves a dictator game. In the second-stage, the recipient in the dictator game has the opportunity to lie to her counterpart. We study how the fairness of dictator-game outcomes affects subsequent lying decisions where lying hurts one’s counterpart. In doing so, we examine whether the moral cost of lying varies when retaliating against unkind actions is financially beneficial for the self (selfish lies), as opposed to being costly (spiteful lies). We find evidence that individuals engage in deception to reciprocate unkind behavior: The smaller the payoff received in the first stage, the higher the lying rate. Intention-based reciprocity largely drives behavior, as individuals use deception to punish unkind behavior and truth-telling to reward kind behavior. For selfish lies, individuals have a moral cost of lying. However, for spiteful lies, we find no evidence for such costs. Taken together, our data show a moral cost of lying that is not fixed but instead context-dependent.

We extend the results of Bartling and Fischbacher (Rev. Econ. Stud. 79(1):67–87, 2012) by showing that, by delegating to an intermediary, a dictator facing an allocation decision can effectively shift blame onto the delegee even when doing so necessarily eliminates the possibility of a fair outcome. Dictators choosing selfishly via an intermediary are punished less and earn greater profits than those who do so directly. Despite being powerless to influence the fairness of the outcome, an intermediary given the choice between two unfair outcomes is punished more than when the dictator chooses one directly. This is not the case when the intermediary merely can initiate the random selection of one of the outcomes. Our findings reinforce and clarify the usefulness of agency as a tool to evade perceived culpability.

Many experiments have demonstrated the power of norm enforcement— peer monitoring and punishment—to maintain, or even increase, contributions in social dilemma settings, but little is known about the underlying norms that monitors use to make punishment decisions, either within or across groups. Using a large sample of experimental data, we empirically recover the set of norms used most often by monitors and show first that the decision to punish should be modeled separately from the decision of how much to punish. Second, we show that absolute norms often fit the data better than the group average norm often assumed in related work. Third, we find that different norms seem to influence the decisions about punishing violators inside and outside one's own group.

Online labor markets provide new opportunities for behavioral research, but conducting economic experiments online raises important methodological challenges. This particularly holds for interactive designs. In this paper, we provide a methodological discussion of the similarities and differences between interactive experiments conducted in the laboratory and online. To this end, we conduct a repeated public goods experiment with and without punishment using samples from the laboratory and the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. We chose to replicate this experiment because it is long and logistically complex. It therefore provides a good case study for discussing the methodological and practical challenges of online interactive experimentation. We find that basic behavioral patterns of cooperation and punishment in the laboratory are replicable online. The most important challenge of online interactive experiments is participant dropout. We discuss measures for reducing dropout and show that, for our case study, dropouts are exogenous to the experiment. We conclude that data quality for interactive experiments via the Internet is adequate and reliable, making online interactive experimentation a potentially valuable complement to laboratory studies.