When faced with the choice of behaving corruptly, are people more willing to accept a bribe or to embezzle money? Situations of bribery and embezzlement usually differ in their decision-making dynamics, with bribery requiring coordination between decision-makers (i.e., briber and bribee) while embezzlement does not require such coordination for a decision of corruption. This study makes use of outcome-equivalent games to examine participants’ willingness to engage in these two types of corruption. The results show people are more likely to undertake bribery than embezzlement, and this is attributed to the joint decision-making dynamic of bribery, which shapes the responsibility for the outcome of corruption to be shared between the decision-makers instead of concentrated as it is in a situation of embezzlement. In an additional experiment eliciting social norms related to bribery and embezzlement, I find a clear norm of no-corruption, which highlights a discrepancy between the perceived appropriateness of these situations and the actual behavior exhibited in them. I further find that the social appropriateness ratings for each type of corruption are not significantly different. My findings suggest that anticorruption efforts should account for factors that facilitate rule-breaking behavior, such as coordinated decisions that lead to shared responsibility for the outcome.
Attribution of Responsibility for Corrupt Decisions (with Maria Montero and Alex Possajennikov) Under Review
This paper studies responsibility attribution for outcomes of collusive bribery. In an experiment, participants labeled as either citizens or public officials can propose a bribery transaction to another participant (labeled as either public official or citizen, respectively), who decides whether to accept the proposal. We then let either the victims of the corrupt transaction or the bystanders of it judge the individual decisions of proposing and accepting. We interpret these judgments as a measure of responsibility attribution. We find that labels (citizen or public official) have a stronger effect than roles (proposer or responder): public officials are consistently regarded as more responsible for corruption than citizens, while those accepting a bribe are regarded as only somewhat more responsible than those proposing it. Further, we find that victims judge corruption decisions more severely than bystanders, although bystanders' judgments are also consistently negative. In treatments with a neutral context, we find that judgments are less harsh than in the corruption context, bystanders' judgments are much less harsh than those of victims, and responders are judged more severely than proposers. Our results suggest that people judge corrupt actors in context, more harshly when they are labeled as law enforcers (i.e., public officials), and that unaffected parties (i.e., bystanders) react nearly as negatively to corruption as those directly affected by it (i.e., victims).
When corruption doesn't corrupt: insights on tax evasion, intentions, and norms (with Daniel Parra) Under Review
This paper studies the impact of corruption on tax evasion through an experimental study. Participants decide how much of their earned income to report after learning whether there is a high or low probability of being matched with a corrupt public official who misappropriates tax revenues. We find that an environment with a high probability of misappropriation does not significantly increase tax evasion compared to an environment with a low probability of misappropriation. To test whether intentions matter, we introduce two additional conditions where the probability of misappropriation remains high or low, but the level of misappropriation is determined by random assignment rather than an official’s deliberate choice. We find that tax evasion levels are insensitive to the intentions behind the misappropriation of collected taxes. We also find that tax evaders and compliers report differing social norms across all treatments. The persistence of these differences suggests that compliance decisions are driven more by internalized rules than by malleable social expectations.
The More the Merrier? The Effect of Diffusion of Externality and Shared Responsibility on Corruption Data collected - Draft in preparation
I study how the scope of negative externalities and shared responsibility affect the willingness to engage in corruption. Using an online experiment, I compare the willingness to embezzle of decision makers in cases where the negative externality is diffused among many subjects or concentrated on a single subject and where the responsibility for the decision to embezzle is shared among many decision makers or concentrated on a single decision maker. I find that the willingness to engage in corruption is only significantly affected by whether the impact is concentrated or diffused and not by whether the responsibility is shared or concentrated.
Predictors of in-/out-group differences in altruism (with Erin Krupka) Design Stage
Team decision-making in operations management (with Damian Beil and Stephen Leider) Collecting data