"How many wake-up calls do policy makers need before they admit that their test-and-punish strategy is a failure?" Mr. Schaeffer said.
But if you feel that you can't talk to the culprit without being punished, another strategy is to speak to someone of higher authority who is likely to be sympathetic.
Maybe Sony is beginning to change their mind about the PS3's punishing pricing strategy?
Boyd et al. considered competition between three strategies, cooperators who contribute to the collective good but do not punish, punishers who contribute and punish noncontributors, and defectors who neither contribute nor punish.
The deal, they said, amounted to irresponsible meddling that threatened to undermine a United Nations Security Council strategy to punish, not reward, Tehran.
Here the strategy could punish irresponsible bankers (whose shares and options would be wiped out), avoid having to put a price on the toxic stuff, and enable the government to order the institutions under their control to make more loans.
So in a series of phone calls and meetings, he and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. fashioned a more aggressive strategy to punish anyone who leaked national security information that endangered intelligence-gathering methods and sources.
Claudio Paolillo, regional director of the Interamerican Press Committee, said the obstacles to importing newsprint, as well as recent crackdowns on the reporting of Venezuela's food shortages and rampant violence, were part of the government's strategy to punish independent media.
Breaking with traditional French policy, which has long resisted sanctions as a diplomatic weapon, Mr. Sarkozy laid out a far-reaching strategy to punish Iran economically — through United Nations and European sanctions and by exerting pressure on French and other nations' corporations and banks not to do business there.
One of the most cogent things that Barack Obama said during his 2008 presidential campaigns was that he would sit down with America's enemies since it's bad strategy to "punish" them by not talking with them.
The design imposes minimal restrictions on who can punish whom and when, and therefore allows participants to use a range of punishment strategies.
