Suchergebnisse

There exists evidence in the social science literature that women may be more relationship- oriented, may have higher standards of ethical behavior and may be more concerned with the common good than men are. This would imply that women are more willing to sacri.ce private pro.t for the public good, which would be especially important for political life. A number of papers with field data have found di¤erences in the corrupt activities of males and females, nonetheless they have drawbacks that may be overcome in a lab experiment. The aim of this paper is to see experimentally if women and men, facing the same situation behave in a di¤erent way, as suggested in the .eld-data studies or, on the contrary, they behave in the same way. The results found in the experiment show that women are indeed less corrupt than men.

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).