Audience effects and other-regarding preferences against corruption: Experimental evidence

No Moral Wiggle Room in an Experimental Corruption Game

“…Experimental bribery games with participants in the role of decision makers (e.g., public officials), firms, and—sometimes also—affected third parties are very common in the literature on corruption (for a survey, see Abbink and Serra, 2012 ). Our experimental setting is similar to the corruption game used in Jaber-López et al ( 2014 ), Schram et al ( 2019 ), and García-Gallego et al ( 2020 ). One notable difference is that the externality of corruption in our experiment is endogenous and determined through the performance difference between the two firms who compete for the government contract 3 .…”

“…In addition, given the illegal nature of the phenomenon, reliable observational data on corruption are often hard to obtain, which in turn has led to a surge in research using data from the economic lab. This recent literature has offered experimental evidence on several (behavioral) aspects relating to corruption, such as social norms and culture (Cameron et al, 2009 ; Barr and Serra, 2010 ; Salmon and Serra, 2017 ; Schram et al, 2019 ), gender (Alatas et al, 2009 ), monitoring and punishment (Abbink et al, 2002 ; Armantier and Boly, 2011 ; Serra, 2012 ; Ryvkin et al, 2017 ), wages and appointment procedures of public officials (Azfar and Nelson, 2007 ), legal immunity for bribe givers (Abbink et al, 2014 ), transparency (Khadjavi et al, 2017 ; Parra et al, 2019 ), audience effects and observability (Salmon and Serra, 2017 ; García-Gallego et al, 2020 ).…”

“…wages and appointment procedures of public officials (Azfar and Nelson, 2007), legal immunity for bribe givers (Abbink et al, 2014), transparency (Khadjavi et al, 2017;Parra et al, 2019), audience effects and observability (Salmon and Serra, 2017;García-Gallego et al, 2020).…”