The compliance you need for a cost you can afford: How to use individual and collective sanctions?

In many naturally occurring situations, actors (agents) use individual sanctions or collective sanctions or both to obtain compliance from members of a group. Individual sanctions are sanctions applied to each individual based on that individual’s perceived behavior; collective sanctions are sanctions to all group members based on perceived behavior by some group members. Often, there are constraints on the amount of sanctions an agent may use. I use Heckathorn’s (1990) sequential decision model of group-mediated social control to analyze the power of an agent concerning compliance by group members under such constraints. Results show that whether positive or negative sanctions are considered, the amount of group compliance is an increasing but non-linear step function of the looseness of the constraints. Moreover, it appears that the most cost-effective use of power entails using only collective sanctions when lower levels of compliance are sought, only individual sanctions when higher levels of compliance are sought, and never mixing the two.