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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 study a giver’s generosity depending on her relationship with the recipient and the observer. We assign different group identities to the players using a variation of the minimum group paradigm, and test the effect of group memberships on altruistic giving in the dictator game with a passive observer. The results show that the dictator gives the least when she is from a different group than the other two. We further show that dictators give more when there is no observer. This is driven by male subjects who react more to the presence of the observer.