Gender effects and third-party punishment in social dilemma games

Abstract

This paper investigates whether altruistic punishment when cooperation norms are violated is sensitive to gender effects. Our framework is a one-shot social dilemma game with third-party punishment in which subjects are informed of the others’ gender within their group. This allows us to test whether third-party punishment depends on the punisher’s as well as on the contributors’ gender. We include treatments where the contributors have either the same or different gender from that of the third-party punishers. Our findings indicate that the assignment of altruistic punishment is gender sensitive. While third-party punishment is assigned similarly when contributors have the same gender as third-party punishers, this is not the case when the gender of the contributors and third-party punishers is different. Third-party male punishers sanction significantly harsher female contributors and earn significantly less relative to third-party female punishers when matched with male contributors. Overall, our results have important implications for the design of teams in the presence of free-riding incentives.