In baseball, there is an old saying that "nice guys finish last." Is this true in the competitive corporate world? Researchers at Harvard University attempted to answer this question and reported their results in Nature (March 20, 2008). In the study, Boston-area college students repeatedly played a version of the game "prisoner's dilemma," where competitors choose cooperation, defection, or costly punishment. (Cooperation meant paying 1 unit for the opponent to receive 2 units; defection meant gaining 1 unit at a cost of 1 unit for the opponent; and punishment meant paying 1 unit for the opponent to lose 4 units.) At the conclusion of the games, the researchers recorded the average payoff and the number of times punishment was used against each player. A graph of the data is shown in the accompanying scatter plot. Does it appear that average payoff is associated with punishment use? The researchers concluded that "winners don't punish." Do you agree? Explain.

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0.4 -0.4 5 10 15 20 0 Punishiment use