Ernst Fehr
Member of the NOMIS Foundation Board of Directors
Organization
NOMIS Foundation
University of Zurich
About Ernst Fehr
Ernst Fehr is a NOMIS Board member. He has been professor of microeconomics and experimental economics at the University of Zurich since 1994 and has served as director of its UBS Center for Economics in Society since 2012. He co-led the Attentional and Perceptual Foundations of Economic Behavior project and is currently leading the Psychological Foundations of Social Preferences and Fairness Concerns project.
Born in Hard, Austria, Fehr studied economics at the University of Vienna. He was a permanent visiting professor in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, from 2003 to 2011 and at New York University, US, from 2011 to 2020. Fehr served as chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich from 1999 to 2015 and was president of the Economic Science Association from 2003 to 2005 and of the European Economic Association in 2008.
Research focus
Fehr’s research examines how social preferences and fairness concerns shape behavior in organizations, markets and politics, drawing on insights from economics, psychology, neuroscience and biology. His interdisciplinary research project Attentional and Perceptual Foundations of Economic Behavior (2018–2022) investigated how attention and perception shape economic behavior by linking insights from psychology, neuroscience and economics.
Awards and recognition
For his outstanding scientific achievements, Fehr has received numerous distinctions, including the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize and the Gustav Stolper Award. He holds several honorary doctorates and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts in Germany.
‘s projects
Psychological Foundations of Social Preferences and Fairness Concerns
People routinely judge outcomes not only by what they receive, but also by whether they consider those outcomes to be fair. These fairness concerns shape behavior in countless situations, from wage negotiations and workplace cooperation to charitable giving, political support for redistribution and environmental protection. Despite decades of research, two fundamental questions remain unanswered: Why do people differ so widely in their concern for fairness and the well-being of others? And what standards do they use to judge whether an outcome is fair?
NOMIS researcher
Project period
2026 – 2028
Attentional and Perceptual Foundations of Economic Behavior
Over the last few decades, behavioral economics has grown into one of the leading branches of economics. Yet the behavioral revolution remains incomplete. It is not yet reflected in the “core” curriculum of many departments of economics in proportion to its growth and influence, and some applied subfields of the discipline have yet to incorporate […]
NOMIS researchers
Project period
2018 – 2022
‘s publications
Super-additive cooperation
Repeated interactions provide an evolutionary explanation for one-shot human cooperation that is counterintuitive but orthodox1,2,3. Intergroup competition4,5,6,7 provides an explanation that is intuitive but heterodox. Here, using models and a behavioural experiment, we show that neither mechanism reliably supports cooperation. Ambiguous reciprocity, a class of strategies that is generally ignored in models of reciprocal altruism, undermines cooperation under repeated interactions. This finding challenges repeated interactions as an evolutionary explanation for cooperation in general, which further challenges the claim that repeated interactions in the past can explain one-shot cooperation in the present. Intergroup competitions also do not reliably support cooperation because groups quickly become extremely similar, which limits scope for group selection. Moreover, even if groups vary, group competitions may generate little group selection for multiple reasons. Cooperative groups, for example, may tend to compete against each other8. Whereas repeated interactions and group competitions do not support cooperation by themselves, combining them triggers powerful synergies because group competitions constrain the corrosive effect of ambiguous reciprocity. Evolved strategies often consist of cooperative reciprocity with ingroup partners and uncooperative reciprocity with outgroup partners. Results from a behavioural experiment in Papua New Guinea fit exactly this pattern. They thus suggest neither an evolutionary history of repeated interactions without group competition nor a history of group competition without repeated interactions. Instead, our results suggest social motives that evolved under the joint influence of both mechanisms.
Research Fields
Economic & Social Sciences
‘s news
How did cooperative behavior prevail in human evolution? NOMIS Board Member Ernst Fehr, together with other researchers from the Universities of Zurich, Lausanne and Konstanz, have challenged two prevailing explanations – repeated interactions on the one hand or group competition on the other. Instead, both mechanisms synergistically contribute to fostering cooperation effectively. Their findings were published […]
April 29, 2020
Memory misfires help selfish maintain their self-image
NOMIS researchers Michel Maréchal and Ernst Fehr, who is also a NOMIS board member, have published a study in Nature Communications: Motivated misremembering of selfish decisions. When people behave selfishly, they have a reliable ally to keep their self-image well-polished — their own memory. When asked to recall how generous they were in the past, […]
