Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, Italian National Research Council, Rome, Italy.
Malardalen University, Vasteras, Sweden.
PLoS One. 2020 Apr 24;15(4):e0231879. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231879. eCollection 2020.
We conduct laboratory experiments to study peer effects on compliance with extortive requests. To this aim, we use an "extortion game" with multiple victims. In agreement with our hypothesis, our results show that when the information on peers' behavior is available, compliance with appropriative requests is triggered by conformism among victims rather than by punishment. Moreover, we find that extorted sums are rather small, requests are proportional to the victim's earnings, similar across victims, and are significantly lower when the extorter self-selects into this role. Punishment is rare, but effective. Finally, our results indicate that fairness concerns matter even in a context of extra-legal taxation, shaping both extorters' requests and victims' compliance.
我们进行实验室实验，以研究同伴效应对服从勒索性请求的影响。为此，我们使用了一个带有多个受害者的“勒索游戏”。与我们的假设一致，我们的结果表明，当同伴行为的信息可用时，受害者之间的从众心理而不是惩罚会引发对专断性请求的服从。此外，我们发现被勒索的金额相当小，请求与受害者的收入成正比，在不同受害者之间相似，而且当勒索者自我选择扮演这个角色时，请求会显著降低。惩罚很少见，但很有效。最后，我们的结果表明，公平问题即使在超法律征税的情况下也很重要，它影响着勒索者的请求和受害者的服从。
