Andreas Nicklisch and Irenaeus Wolff, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 84(3): 892–905, 2012
- Shows that the popular reciprocity models systematically miss an important aspect: Most of the time, people don‘t kill others just because these others were slightly unkind even if doing so was costless (i.e., marginal punishment costs were negligible; the point is important because it means fitting any of the models and predicting out-of-situation is doomed to fail whenever marginal punishment costs differ).
- Increasing the fixed costs of punishment makes punishment more extreme, but only among the `reciprocity types‘: the fractions of selfish and inequality-averse players are small and stable.
