Third party punishment and criminal: an experiment with Italian camorra prison inmates

Abstract

In Third Party punishment experiments (Fehr et al.; 2004), an agent may be punished for violating a social norm by an uninvolved observer - or third party - whose payoff is unaffected by the behavior of the same agent. In our research, we attempt to improve the understanding of Third Party punishment by reproducing an experiment conducted by Fehr et al. 2004 (TP-PD) with a sample of Camorra prison inmates. We then compare the decisions of the Camorra inmates with the behavior of university students with similar social and economic backgrounds. Our primary conclusion is that there are significant differences in cooperative and sanctioning behavior.