Research
Working Papers
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.
Work in Progress
Attribution of Responsibility in Corrupt Decisions (with Maria Montero and Alex Possajennikov)
This paper studies responsibility attribution for outcomes of collusive bribery. In an experiment, we let either citizens or officials propose a bribe interchange to the other, and the other decides whether to accept the proposal. We then ask the victims of the corrupt transaction or the bystanders of it to judge the individual decisions of proposing and accepting a bribe interchange. We interpret their judgments as a measure of responsibility attribution. We identify three features in our data: (i) the person accepting a bribe interchange that has been proposed is regarded as more responsible than the person proposing it, but only when accepting the bribe is a decision taken by officials, (ii) officials are regarded as more responsible for corruption than citizens, even more, when they are the ones accepting the corrupt transaction, and (iii) victims do not assign responsibility consistently more than bystanders do. Our results suggest that people find corrupt actors responsible for the outcomes of corruption at different levels depending on factors like whether they are attached to a label of law enforcer (i.e., official), and whether they are the ones sealing the deal by accepting the bribe.
The More the Merrier? The Effect of Diffusion of Externality and Shared Responsibility on Corruption
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.
The Effect of Corruption on Tax Evasion (with Daniel Parra)
Previous research on tax compliance has shown that individuals’ decision to pay taxes is shaped not only by intrinsic motivation but also by extrinsic factors like perceived fairness of the tax system, reliability of the political system, and, more specifically, the perceived level of corruption in the society. The evidence suggests that there is a positive correlation between corruption and tax evasion. However, we know little about if and how corruption causes tax evasion. Therefore, our study aims to identify the causal effect of corruption on individual levels of tax evasion. We divide our study into two experiments. The first one is used to create an objective prior about the level of corruption. And the second one is a tax evasion game where participants can lie about their income.