SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DI DIRITTO ED ECONOMIA
Stefania Ottone (Unoversity of Turin)
Peter Lewisch (University of Vienna)
Ferruccio Ponzano (University of Eastern Piedmont)
Abstract
The social sciences, and economics in particular, have emphasized for a long time the crucial role of punishment as a tool to achieve social stability. Punishment, however, is costly for the punisher. Usually, interdisciplinary studies underline the private cost of punishment (Galle and Mungan 2021)
as well as both its social and private benefits (Levy, 2022). In an instrumental perspective, punishment is likely to be carried out, if expected individual benefits are higher than individual costs.
‘Altruistic punishment’ (i.e., costly punishment that serves no instrumental goal for the punisher) could serve, as suggested by the pertinent experimental literature, as a powerful enforcer of social norms. The category of “altruistic punishment” covers all non-instrumental motivations, ranging from considerations of just desert and justice to the “sweet taste of revenge”. The possibility of such “utility gains” for the punisher increase the individual benefits of punishment and incidence of its occurrence. We intendto examine experimentally the existence and impact of the “inverse category”, namely a possible negative utility that people may experience when punishing another person. To our knowledge, no economics study exists that focuses on intrinsic disutility of punishment. The basic idea of this “intrinsic disutility of punishment” has been formulated by nobel prize laureate James Buchanan (Buchanan 1975, 130), describing a second category of punishment costs that goes beyond the ‘regular’ resource components (for investigations, proceedings, etc.) required for penal enforcement. This second category captures the negative emotions by the punisher associated with
the deliberate infliction of a bad onto someone else.