Using a laboratory experiment, we examine whether voluntary sanctions induce subjects to coordinate more efficiently in a repeated minimum-effort game. While most groups first experience Pareto inferior coordination in a baseline treatment, the level of effort increases substantially once ex post sanctioning opportunities are introduced, that is, when one can assign costly punishment points to other group members to reduce their payoffs. We compare the effect of this voluntary punishment possibility with the effect of ex post costless communication, which in contrast to the punishment treatment increases efforts only temporarily and fails to bring the players to higher payoff equilibria permanently. Our results indicate that decentralized sanctions can play an important role as a coordination device in Pareto-ranked coordination settings. They also suggest that the motivations behind voluntary sanctions may be more general than usually put forth in the literature on cooperation games.

通过实验室实验，我们检查了自愿制裁是否会促使受试者在重复的最小努力游戏中更有效地协调。虽然大多数团体在基线治疗中首先经历了帕累托劣质协调，但一旦引入事后制裁机会，即当一个人可以向其他团体成员分配代价高昂的惩罚点以减少他们的收益时，努力水平就会大大增加。我们将这种自愿惩罚可能性的效果与事后的效果进行比较无成本的沟通，与惩罚处理相比，只会暂时增加努力，并不能使参与者永久地达到更高的收益均衡。我们的结果表明，分散制裁可以作为帕累托排序协调设置中的协调机制发挥重要作用。他们还表明，自愿制裁背后的动机可能比合作博弈文献中通常提出的动机更为普遍。