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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.

This paper studies the effects of social status - a socially recognized ranking of individuals - on prosocial behavior. We use a laboratory experiment and propose a theory to address this issue. In a one-shot game, two players, whose social status is either earned or randomly assigned, jointly make effort contributions to a project. Player 1 first suggests their effort levels to player 2 who then determines the actual effort for each player. Deviation from the suggestion is costly. We find causal evidence that high-status players are less selfish than their low-status counterparts. In particular, high-status players 2 are less selfish and deviate less from the suggestion when status is earned than when it is randomly assigned. The experimental results and theoretical framework allow us to conclude that a high social ranking yields more social behavior and that this can be attributed to the sense of responsibility that it gives.

We investigate how prescriptive and descriptive norms affect the development of corruption over time. In particular, we are interested in whether the extent of corruption converges. If it does, we study how the level at which it converges depends on the prescriptive norms in the environment in which it takes place and on the information individuals have about others’ corrupt choices, that is, on descriptive norms. In a laboratory experiment implemented in Italy, China and the Netherlands, a Gneezy-type corruption task is used, with a real-effort task. We use a Krupka-Weber elicitation method to obtain information about existing prescriptive norms with respect to corrupt behavior. To induce natural variation in descriptive norms, we vary the type of information about others’ choices. Our results show that corruption is highly contagious everywhere, that is, descriptive norms affect choices. Nevertheless, differences in the effects of descriptive norms are evident across countries. Prescriptive norms concerning bribers’ and judges’ behaviors are observed to differ across the considered subject pools. While in China and the Netherlands it is highly socially inappropriate to bribe and, if you are a decision maker, to treat unfavorably people with high efforts and low bribes, in Italy the norms are the opposite.