Deterrence of Orchestrated Cheating: Group versus Individual Punishment.

The article analyzes the deterrence effects of group punishment—sanctions imposed collectively on all members of a group when a threshold number of members are caught cheating—versus individual punishment in contexts where a leader can facilitate cheating by reducing detection probabilities. Using a game-theoretic model inspired by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s response to the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal, the study finds that group punishment can deter a leader from orchestrating cheating and thereby reduce overall cheating, but only under conditions of sufficiently strong enforcement, large sanctions, and intermediate leader ability to manipulate detection. Conversely, if enforcement is weak, sanctions are small, or the leader’s manipulation ability is too high or too low, group punishment may increase individual cheating due to moral hazard and wrongful conviction effects. Extending the model to large groups, the authors show that an intermediate group punishment threshold optimally balances deterrence and moral hazard, producing stable equilibria with lower cheating rates, while very low or very high thresholds either exacerbate cheating or fail to deter the leader. The findings have broader implications for designing sanctions in settings such as counterterrorism, espionage, and academic or commercial norm violations, highlighting the tradeoffs between fairness, deterrence, and the risk of punishing innocent group members.