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This paper studies how social ties interact with bribery and corruption. In the laboratory, subjects are in triads where two ‘performers’ individually complete an objective real-effort task and an evaluator designates one of them as the winner of a monetary prize. In one treatment dimension, we vary whether performers can bribe the evaluator—where any bribe made is non-refundable, irrespective of the evaluator’s decision. A second treatment dimension varies the induced social ties between the evaluator and the performers. The experimental evidence suggests that both bribes and social ties may corrupt evaluators’ decisions. Bribes decrease the importance of performance in the decision. The effect of social ties is asymmetric. While performers’ bribes vary only little with their ties to the evaluator, evaluators exhibit favoritism based on social ties when bribes are not possible. This ‘social-tie-based’ corruption is, however, replaced by bribe-based corruption when bribes are possible. We argue that these results have concrete consequences for possible anti-corruption policies.

Do reciprocal workers work more if their wage compares well to similar workers in the economy? Are they more satisfied with their job? Predictions vary from theories. With a survey dataset with a representative sample of the German population, I construct a reference wage and measures for reciprocity for each worker. Depending on how much more or less a worker earns than the reference, I investigate how effort and job satisfaction react to reciprocity tendencies. The results suggest that a worker’s unpaid overtime hours increase with her relative earnings if above the reference; and the more so, the stronger her positive reciprocity tendency is. However, there is no such interaction for negative reciprocity. Job satisfaction is associated with reciprocity, yet insensitive to the interaction between reciprocity and relative income.