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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.

For successful anti-corruption policies, it is crucial to understand the basic social contract governing the interaction between people. Social norms are a key element of the social contract, but may vary across cultures. We investigate how descriptive social norms affect the development of corruption over time. In a laboratory experiment implemented in the Netherlands, Russia, Italy, and China we study a corruption game that is based on a real-effort task. To induce natural variation in descriptive norms, we vary the type of information about others’ choices. Such information may lead to ‘contagion’ -where corruption increases in response to observing high corruption by others- or ‘conformism’ -where it decreases when low corruption by others is observed. Our results show evidence of contagion.

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.

Cooperation among group members is the ultimate pursuit in any collective actions. We examine the collective tasks of approving the use of a reserve fund for maintaining facilities covering approximately 5,000 projects and 635 communities in Nanjing, China. In these communities, any maintenance projects that are covered by the Reserve Fund for Maintenance (RFM) need to be approved by the households. Once the RFM is insufficient to cover, households should be notified about the situation and pay in cash by themselves. We focus on the effect of insufficient RFM on the approval rates of maintenance projects. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that a 1,000 yuan increase in extra cash payment will increase the consent rates of implementing a maintenance plan by approximately 1.04%. Our results suggest that additional information revealed by RFM-uncovered maintenance costs could be a potential mechanism to promote cooperation in making public maintenance decisions by surveying 112 householders involved in the maintenance projects.

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.

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.

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.