I was under the impression that things like "economic damages" and "pain and suffering" were still categorized as "compensatory damages" and that in cases like this where the defendant is a large billion-dollar corporation, the punitive damages were where the exorbitant figures come from -- the reason being that the courts awarded millions and millions of dollars (still a small fraction of the billions in revenue the company collects) in order to achieve a financially punitive effect on the corporation so that such punishments are actually "felt" by the company.
Am I off-base there?