Behavioral Dishonesty in the Public Sector

Abstract

We investigate the usefulness of the dice game paradigm to public administration as a standardized way of measuring (dis)honesty among individuals, groups, and societies. Measures of dishonesty are key for the field’s progress in understanding individual, organizational, and societal differences in unethical behavior and corruption. We first describe the dice game paradigm and its advantages and then discuss a range of considerations for how to implement it. Next, we highlight the potential of the dice game paradigm across two diverse studies: prospective public employees in Denmark (n = 441) and prospective public employees in 10 different countries with very different levels of corruption (n = 1,091). In the first study, we show how individual-level behavioral dishonesty is very strongly negatively correlated with public service motivation. In the second study, we find that widely used country-level indicators of corruption are strongly correlated with the average behavioral dishonesty among prospective public employees. The results illustrate the importance of the validated dice game paradigm to shed light on core questions that link micro- and macro-level dynamics of dishonesty and corruption in the public sector.

Character or context: What explains behavioural dishonesty in low-income countries?

“…The same effect direction (although smaller in magnitude) obtains for both the PSM sacrifice and interest sub-dimensions, suggesting that individuals willing to make some sacrifice for the public interest, as well as those with interest in public policy-making, are more likely to cheat. While these results would appear contrary to those of Olsen et al (2018) with Danish students, it merits note that the amount of variation in these measure of public sector motivation is limited, with the majority of participants scoring high (see Table 1); also, and more in line with expectations, for the small share recording a low score for public sector values they do appear more likely to cheat.…”

“…We operationalize our measure of pro-sociality as the share of the gratuity individuals were willing to donate.8 The validity of the dice game against real-world behaviour has been confirmed in different studies using it in field experiments. SeeOlsen et al (2018) for an overview.…”

Perceptual Bias and Public Programs: The Case of the United States and Hospital Care

“…Individual taxpayer compliance, one of the basic needs of all governing systems, is also associated with levels of corruption (DeBacker, Heim, and Tran ), the provision of public goods (Hallsworth et al ), and social norms (Luttmer and Singhal ). Olsen et al () demonstrate that behaviors linked to corruption correlate with macro estimates of country‐­level corruption, and Kim et al () show distinct cross‐national patterns of public service motivation.…”

“All still quiet on the non-Western front?” Non-Western public service motivation scholarship: 2015–2020

“…13-14). Further, the findings of studies by Gans-Morse et al (2020) and Olsen et al (2019) demonstrate a strong negative correlation between PSM and unethical behaviour.…”