서강대학교

초록/요약

Third-party punishment (TPP) is known to be a crucial instrument for enforcing social norms in a human society since it forces even strangers to follow norm abiding behavior. Indeed, a number of experimental studies show that third parties whose material payoff is not affected by others’ action are likely to impose costly punishment on a person who violated a salient norm. However, it has been also argued that TPP rarely appears in the field, implying it may be fragile because of some factors in the real world. We, in this study, investigate whether a third party’s dominated risky investment option in terms of material payoffs affects his or her sanctioning behavior using an experimental method. Recent neuroscientific literature on context effects including a decoy effect and a compromise effect, on a risky decision-making and on sanctioning behavior, suggest the possibility that the existence of the unattractive alternative could reduce TPP. Indeed, we find that the extent of TPP significantly decreases when the dominated risky investment option is also available to a third party. Moreover, demand for the investment tends to increase when both TPP and the investment options are available, which may support the argument that the dominated risky investment option tends to work as a compromise rather than a decoy.