Can Corruption be Studied in the Lab? Comparing a Field and a Lab Experiment

Abstract

This paper makes an attempt at testing the external validity of corruption experiments by moving from the lab in a developed country, to where it matters the most, the …eld in a developing country. In our experiment a candidate proposes a bribe to a grader in order to obtain a better grade. We …nd the direction and the magnitude of most treatment e¤ects to be statistically indistinguishable between the lab and the …eld. In particular, increasing the graders'wage reduces in both environments the probability to accept the bribe. Finally, we identify several micro-determinants of corruption (age, religiousness, ability). We would like to thank the recruiting …rm Opty-RH for its help with hiring subjects in Burkina Faso. Finally, the authors gratefully acknowledge …nancing from the CRSH. As always, all remaining errors are ours.

Let’s Play: Bribery Games in the US and Germany

“…Several papers in theoretical and empirical literature on corruption focus on individual determinants of corruption and consider the influence of an individual's gender (Rivas 2013;Frank et al 2011;Rivas 2013), amount of wages (Azfar and Nelson 2007;Van Veldhuizen 2011), the amount of bribe, level of monitoring and punishment (Frank and Schulze 2000;Banuri and Eckel 2011), religion (Rivas 2013;Armantier and Boly 2008) and the cultural transmissions of corruption (Andvig and Moene 1990;Tirole 1996;Hauk and Saez-Marti 2002). Abbink (2002) published one of the most important studies on the topic, analyzing individual decision-making in an experimental corruption game.…”

“…Another gender-corruption-explanation offered by Rivas (2013) is that women are more sensitive to others' losses and that is why they choose the corrupt alternative with negative externalities over all the other participants less frequently. For the citizens, however, we assume that gender does have an influence because women seem to be more responsive to punishment, compared to men (Armantier and Boly 2008;Esarey and Chirillo 2013;Esary and Schwindt-Bayer 2016).…”

“…I also check if there is a relationship between an individual's religious identification and the propensity to offer or accept the bribe (Dreher et al 2007;Armantier and Boly 2008;Treisman 2000). For instance, Dreher et al 2007, p. 448) theorizes that "religion may shape social attitudes towards social hierarchy and family values and thus determine the acceptability, or otherwise, of corrupt practices.…”

Diseños experimentales para el estudio de la corrupción: conceptos e investigaciones claves

“…Intentando hacer frente a estos retos, desde comienzos de los años 2000 (Frank y Shulze, 2000), se han venido desarrollando estudios que utilizan diseños experimentales, los que presentan un conjunto de ventajas frente a los diseños tradicionales; tres son los diseños experimentales utilizados en el campo del estudio de la corrupción: el experimento en laboratorio, el experimento en campo y el experimento por encuesta. Estos estudios, sobre todo desarrollados por la economía experimental y la ciencia política, presentan prometedores hallazgos en torno al entendimiento de los factores que llevan a los sujetos a cometer actos de corrupción y al testeo de medidas anticorrupción (Armantier y Bolyy, 2008).…”

When reciprocity becomes back-scratching: an economic inquiry

“…A key finding by Abbink (2004) is that staff rotation is effective at reducing bribery and corrupt decisions, where rotation was implemented by randomly pairing bribers and public officials each round. The basic RBG design has since been augmented to allow for whistle-blowing (Schikora, 2011a;Lambsdorff & Frank, 2010), an outside informed monitor (Schikora, 2011b), payoff variations that mimic high non-bribery wages (van Veldhuizen, 2011;Armantier & Boly, 2008), and 'citizen' and probabilistic punishment (Abbink et al , 2002;Serra, 2012;Cameron et al , 2009). Abbink (2004) cautions though that the fixed briber-official setup of the RBG (where the experimenter determines the possible alliance) does not fit situations where unobserved alliances already exist before policy interventions take place, nor where the composition of the alliances is completely indeterminate ex ante, i.e.…”