Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity

Fehr, Ernst; Gächter, Simon

doi:10.1257/jep.14.3.159

Cited by 2,570 publications

(1,033 citation statements)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

934

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Chimpanzees are retaliatory, in that they are negatively reciprocal (34), at least on a very short time scale, consistent with retribution as a means of discipline in animal societies (2,(22)(23)(24). Retribution did not enforce cooperative behavior through reciprocity in the current experiments likely due in part to the fact that subjects switched roles only once and only after engaging with all others.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 65%

Chimpanzees are vengeful but not spiteful

Jensen

Call

Tomasello

2007

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

151

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People are willing to punish others at a personal cost, and this apparently antisocial tendency can stabilize cooperation. What motivates humans to punish noncooperators is likely a combination of aversion to both unfair outcomes and unfair intentions. Here we report a pair of studies in which captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) did not inflict costs on conspecifics by knocking food away if the outcome alone was personally disadvantageous but did retaliate against conspecifics who actually stole the food from them. Like humans, chimpanzees retaliate against personally harmful actions, but unlike humans, they are indifferent to simply personally disadvantageous outcomes and are therefore not spiteful.cooperation ͉ fairness ͉ other-regard ͉ punishment ͉ reciprocity P eople will willingly suffer a cost to punish others. Although this does not sound like a formula for cooperation, something that humans are exceedingly good at, theoretical models and experimental evidence show that in the absence of punishment, cooperation does not survive the degrading influence of free-riders (1). Punishment, in the biological sense, is a strategy that decreases the occurrence of a behavior, and it is typically selfish in that it provides a future benefit for the individual such as the reduction of harmful behavior received from others (2) † . Punishment can make an act of spite, incurring a cost to impose a cost on another individual, beneficial in the long run and is therefore a means to an end. Spite, on the other hand, is the decreasing of the welfare of another individual as an end in itself, just as proximate-level altruism has increasing the welfare of another as the ultimate end (3). Negative reciprocity makes spite selfish just as positive reciprocity does for altruism (4). We use the term ''spiteful'' for proximate-level spite to distinguish it from ultimate-level spite ‡ .A special form of punishment has been revealed in economic experiments such as the ultimatum and public goods games. This ''altruistic punishment'' (7) provides benefits in the form of increased cooperation to others, whereas the punisher alone bears the costs. It could be argued that on a short time-scale, such unselfish punishment is spitefully motivated, and altruistic outcomes are an unintended byproduct; to our knowledge, the underlying motivations behind altruistic punishment remain to be shown. What might motivate punitive and possibly spiteful behaviors is that, instead of acting solely selfishly and counting only one's own gains and losses, people appear to compare their outcomes with those of others and appraise the motives behind the actions of others. The punishment of others based on unfair outcomes (8, 9) or intentions (10-13) has been argued to be a central and possibly unique feature of human cooperation.There is currently controversy about whether nonhuman primates also have a sense of fairness (in the sense of personally disadvantageous outcomes). Capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) reject food offered b...

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 65%

Chimpanzees are vengeful but not spiteful

Jensen

Call

Tomasello

2007

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

151

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In line with the important role of the reciprocity principle in people's behavior (e.g., Fehr & Gächter, 2000), we found that participants generally reacted more positively to confirming feedback from their communication partner than to disconfirming feedback. However, whereas we expected that online communication would intensify both positive and negative responses, only negative responses (to disconfirming feedback) were intensified online.…”

Section: The Effect Of Feedback On the Receiver's Reciprocal Feedbacksupporting

confidence: 83%

An experimental test of the effects of online and face-to-face feedback on self-esteem

Vossen¹,

Koutamanis²,

Walther³

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Reciprocation implies a relationship in which one party responds in kind for a deed (good or bad) by the other party (Fehr & Gächter, 2000). Under PWYW, customers might be reciprocating the behavior of the seller for the product or services they received.…”

Section: Why Do People Pay More Under Pif? Four Possible Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paying more when paying for others.

Jung

Nelson

Gneezy

et al. 2014

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social behavior is heavily influenced by the perception of the behaviors of others. We considered how perceptions (and misperceptions) of kindness can increase generosity in economic transactions. We investigated how these perceptions can alter behavior in a novel real-life situation that pitted kindness against selfishness. That situation, consumer elective pricing, is defined by an economic transaction allowing people to purchase goods or services for any price (including zero). Field and lab experiments compared how people behave in 2 financially identical circumstances: pay-what-you-want (in which people are ostensibly paying for themselves) and pay-it-forward (in which people are ostensibly paying on behalf of someone else). In 4 field experiments, people paid more under pay-it-forward than pay-what-you-want (Studies 1-4). Four subsequent lab studies assessed whether the salience of others explains the increased payments (Study 5), whether ability to justify lowered payments (Study 6), and whether the manipulation was operating through changing the perceptions of others (Studies 7 and 8). When people rely on ambiguous perceptions, pay-it-forward leads to overestimating the kindness of others and a corresponding increase in personal payment. When those perceptions are replaced with explicit descriptive norms (i.e., others' payment amounts), that effect is eliminated. Finally, subsequent studies confirmed that the effects were not driven by participant confusion (Studies 9A and 9B) and not limited by the specificity of the referent other in the pay-it-forward framing (Study 9C).

show abstract

Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity

Cited by 2,570 publications

References 27 publications

Chimpanzees are vengeful but not spiteful

Chimpanzees are vengeful but not spiteful

An experimental test of the effects of online and face-to-face feedback on self-esteem

Paying more when paying for others.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About