RT Journal Article
T1 On punishment and well-being
A1 Brandts, Jordi
A1 Rivas Rodríguez, María Fernanda
AB The existence of punishment opportunities has been shown to cause efficiency in some public goods experiments to increase considerably. In this paper we ask whether punishment also has a downside in terms of process dissatisfaction. We conduct an experiment to study the conjecture that an environment with strong punishment possibilities may lead to higher material payoffs but lower subjective well-being, in comparison with weaker punishment or no punishment possibilities at all. The more general motivation for our study stems from the notion that people’s subjective well-being may be affected by the institutional environment they find themselves in. Our findings show that harsher punishment possibilities lead to significantly higher well-being, controlling for earnings and other relevant variables. These results complement the evidence on the neural basis of altruistic punishment reported in De Quervain et al. (2004).
PB Elsevier
SN 0167-2681
YR 2009
FD 2009
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/94349
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/94349
LA eng
NO Brandts, Jordi, y María Fernanda Rivas. «On Punishment and Well-Being». Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 72, n.o 3 (diciembre de 2009): 823-34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2009.08.001.
NO Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 17 abr 2025