What is an altruistic punishment?

Ernst Fehr (born 1956) is an Austrian economist and a Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economic Research, as well as the chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. His research covers the areas of the evolution of human cooperation and sociality, in particular fairness, reciprocity and bounded rationality. In his 2002 collaboration with Urs Fischbacher, Why Social Preferences Matter – The Impact of Non-Selfish Motives on Competition, Cooperation and Incentives, he begins like follows:

He conjectures that we could call economics “the dismal science” because it consistently assumes the worst in human motives, which contrasts sharply with the pervasive idea that consumer tastes are heterogeneous. He attacks the idea on two fronts. First, because a great amount of evidence has contradicted the selfishness hypothesis; second, because failure to regard other-concerning behavior ignores central market activities.

Indeed, human altruism extends far beyond reciprocal altruism and reputation-based cooperation, taking the form of strong reciprocity. Strong reciprocity is a combination of altruistic rewarding, which is a predisposition to reward others for cooperative, norm-abiding behaviors, and altruistic punishment, which is a propensity to impose sanctions on others for norm violations.


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