Recent studies question whether societies can self-govern public goods dilemmas with the help of decentralized punishment opportunities. One important challenge is imperfect information about individuals’ contributions. In laboratory experiments, imperfect information increases misdirected punishment and thereby hampers the efficacy of the punishment mechanism. A key question is thus whether those facing such a collective action dilemma would punish despite doubt if they could observe one another’s actions more accurately at some cost. We find that most experimental subjects prefer to engage in costly monitoring before punishing, or else not to punish at all. We demonstrate a price sensitive demand for monitoring, a tendency of known monitoring to serve as a warning of punishment, a taste-based preference for full over partial monitoring, and positive effects of monitoring on cooperation and efficiency.

最近的研究质疑社会是否可以在分散惩罚机会的帮助下自治公共物品困境。一项重要的挑战是关于个人贡献的信息不完整。在实验室实验中，不完全信息会增加误导性惩罚，从而阻碍惩罚机制的有效性。因此，一个关键的问题是，如果他们能够以某种代价更准确地观察彼此的行为，那么面对这种集体行动困境的人是否会不顾怀疑地进行惩罚。我们发现大多数实验对象更愿意在惩罚之前进行昂贵的监控，或者根本不惩罚。我们表现​​出对监控的价格敏感需求，已知监控作为惩罚警告的趋势，基于品味的偏好全面监控，而不是部分监控，