Friend or foe? Social ties in bribery and corruption - Kölner UniversitätsPublikationsServer

Di Zheng, Jin, Schram, Arthur ORCID: 0000-0002-1767-4998 and Doğan, Gönül ORCID: 0000-0002-1075-1102 (2020). Friend or foe? Social ties in bribery and corruption. Experimental Economics, 24. pp. 854-882. DORDRECHT: Springer Science. ISSN 1573-6938

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DOI:10.1007/s10683-020-09683-7

Link to the document: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-020-09683-7

Abstract

This paper studies how social ties interact with bribery and corruption. In the laboratory, subjects are in triads where two 'performers' individually complete an objective real-effort task and an evaluator designates one of them as the winner of a monetary prize. In one treatment dimension, we vary whether performers can bribe the evaluator-where any bribe made is non-refundable, irrespective of the evaluator's decision. A second treatment dimension varies the induced social ties between the evaluator and the performers. The experimental evidence suggests that both bribes and social ties may corrupt evaluators' decisions. Bribes decrease the importance of performance in the decision. The effect of social ties is asymmetric. While performers' bribes vary only little with their ties to the evaluator, evaluators exhibit favoritism based on social ties when bribes are not possible. This 'social-tie-based' corruption is, however, replaced by bribe-based corruption when bribes are possible. We argue that these results have concrete consequences for possible anti-corruption policies.

Item Type:

Journal Article

Creators:

Creators	Email	ORCID	ORCID Put Code
Di Zheng, Jin	UNSPECIFIED	UNSPECIFIED	UNSPECIFIED
Schram, Arthur	UNSPECIFIED	orcid.org/0000-0002-1767-4998	UNSPECIFIED
Doğan, Gönül	UNSPECIFIED	orcid.org/0000-0002-1075-1102	UNSPECIFIED