Essays on the Theory of Collective Punishment

This dissertation consists of three essays on the strategic logic of collective punishment. 

The first essay studies why rulers knowingly punish the innocent. A ruler who can perfectly observe who obeys or disobeys designs a directed graph of collective responsibility, specifying who is punished for whose disobedience. Making people responsible for others trades vertical for horizontal deterrence: it reduces the protection generated by one's own obedience, but can induce people to police each other.

The second essay studies why rulers punish people for failure to report their disobedient peers. Now the ruler observes individual disobedience independently with some probability. When reporting is costly, punishing silence elicits information only under two-sided ignorance: the ruler must not know what people know, namely who disobeyed, and people must not know what the ruler already knows. Denunciation regimes are therefore optimal only at intermediate detection probabilities.

The third essay studies collective punishment when the ruler observes only how many people disobey. The obedience-maximizing rule is a threshold chosen to maximize individual pivotality. Such a threshold must be self-modal: from any person's perspective, it is the most likely number of other disobedient people under the equilibrium distribution that the threshold itself induces. As a result, collective punishment can be frequent even when individual disobedience is rare.