types and patterns an experimental east west german comparison of cooperation and solidarity abstract in a study of public good and solidarity experiments conducted in eastern and western germany we found in both games that eastern subjects behave in a significantly more selfish manner than do western subjects besides that we found that many qualitative results of both data sets are similar since our experiments were conducted in two parts of one nation we present an unusually well controlled cross cultural study by avoiding difficulties that usually arise in multinational settings we conclude that cooperation and solidarity behavior seem to depend strongly on different culture specific norms resulting from opposing economic and social histories in the two parts of germany

a theory of collective reputations with applications to the persistence of corruption and to firm quality the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by his past behaviour and because his track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper thus studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality 1 collective reputations collective reputations play an important role in economics and the social sciences countries ethnic racial or religious groups are known to be hard working honest corrupt hospitable or belligerent some firms enjoy substantial rents from their reputations for producing high quality products some departments are reported to treat their faculty or students fairly the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by her past behaviour and because her track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations in a model in which current generations are progressively replaced by new ones and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature see section 2 for a detailed comparison with the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality let us spell out the building blocks of our theory in more detail a a group s reputation is only as good as that of its members each member is characterized by individual traits such as talent diligence or honesty past individual behaviour conveys information about these traits and generates individual reputations

a policy oriented theory of corruption perspectives from political science and economics are drawn on to suggest an integrated theory of governmental corruption the theory is oriented toward policy choices and corruption is viewed as a product of individual and structural variables that interact to produce both positive and negative consequences individual level considerations such as greed and the likelihood of detection and prosecution suggest one set of policies for reducing corruption bureaucratic constraints citizen participation and the congruence of legal structures and social demands offer a competing set of concerns that must be dealt with in analyzing corrupt practices we show that corruption as a process influences the optimal level of social welfare alternative conceptions are examined and a model is developed to evaluate policy choices related to corruption from the perspective of welfare optimization applied to the analysis of corruption the model integrates general equilibrium theory deterrence theory and structural conditions finally policy implications are considered

spanish unions institutional legacy and responsiveness to economic and industrial change using empirical data drawn from multiple sources including interview material the author examines spanish trade unions responses to the reorganization of spain s economy and changes in the struc

corruption as a self fulfilling prophecy evidence from a survey experiment in costa rica an influential body of scholarship argues that corruption behaves as a selffulfilling prophecy the idea of this work is that levels of corruption emerge endogenously as a result of a society wide coordination game in which ther individual returns to corrupt behavior are a function of how disposed towards corruption the other members of society are perceived as being an empirical implication of this logic is that if one were to exogenously perturb beliefs about societal levels of corruption upward willingness to engage in corruption should increase as a consequence the current paper evaluates this claim by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large scale household survey conducted in the gran area metropolitana gam of costa rica from october 2013 to april 2014 n 4200 changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of costa ricans who have experienced or directly observed an act of corruption from 2006 to 2011 the paper finds that on average assignment to this display relative to the control condition increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to pay a bribe to a police officer by approximately 0 04 to 0 08 thereby providing supporting evidence for the self fulfilling prophecy hypothesis

the back scratching game we develop a new experiment to study the emergence of welfare reducing bilateral alliances within larger groups and the effectiveness of institutional interventions to curtail back scratching in each of the 25 rounds of our experiments a player the allocator nominates one of three others in a group as a co worker the receiver which determines the group production that period to be the productivity of the receiver which varies by round but also gives the receiver a bonus and makes them the allocator in the next round alliances then form if two individuals keep choosing each other even when their productivities are lower than that of others causing efficiency losses we study whether particular interventions reduce the rate of alliance formation random allocator rotation policies were found to be ineffective whether implemented prior to or following a baseline treatment low bonuses did significantly reduce the advent of alliances there hence seems to be some hope in preventing back scratching via reducing the gain that can be made by alliances

is more competition always better an experimental study of extortionary corruption using a laboratory experiment we assess whether increasing competition among public officials reduces extortionary corruption we find that increasing the number of providers has no effect on bribe demands when citizens search costs are high but it increases corruption when search costs are low the effect is absent in a parallel setting framed as a standard market which we attribute to citizens using a nonsequential search strategy as opposed to sequential search in the corruption setting we conclude that efforts to reduce search costs such as infrastructure investments are preferable to anti corruption policies aimed at increasing the number of providers jel d73 d49 c91

obtaining a driver s license in india an experimental approach to studying corruption we conduct two experiments to understand the process of obtaining a driver s license in india in the first experiment we randomly assign license candidates to one of three groups bonus offered a financial reward if they could obtain their license fast lesson offered free driving lessons upfront and control the control group alone illustrates bureaucratic failures 71 of the license getters in that group avoided the mandated driving test and 62 failed a surprise driving test the system responds to private needs there are more license getters in the bonus group but at a social cost there are more license getters who cannot drive in the bonus group the system however also appears to respond to social considerations as there are more license getters in the lesson group large extra legal payments are made by license getters those in the control group pay 2 5 times the official fee more of these extra legal payments take place in the bonus group surprisingly these extra legal payments are not direct bribes to bureaucrats but instead payments to agents in the second experiment we perform an audit study to better understand the role of agents the audit shows that agents can provide licenses to individuals even if they cannot drive but the audit also shows that agents cannot as easily circumvent all other rules we argue that our findings are most consistent with agents being the channel for corruption in this system we also report some suggestive evidence that bureaucrats create red tape possibly to induce more license candidates to use agents

exposing corrupt politicians the effects of brazil s publicly released audits on electoral outcomes author s finan frederico ferraz claudio abstract this paper examines the extent to which access to information enhances political accountability based upon the results of brazil s recent anti corruption program that randomly audits municipal expenditures of federally transferred funds it estimates the effect of the disclosure of local government corruption practices upon the re election success of incumbent mayors in municipal elections comparing municipalities which were randomly audited before the elections with those audited after the analysis shows that the disclosure of audit results had a significant impact on the re election rates of mayors found to be corrupt for a one standard deviation increase in reported corruption the audit policy reduced the incumbent s likelihood of re election by 25 percent this effect is more pronounced in municipalities where radio stations are present and higher levels of corruption are identified these findings highlight the value of information and the role of the media in reducing informational asymmetries in the political process thus enabling voters to not only hold corrupt politicians accountable but also to reward non corrupt politicians

corruption and development a review of issues in this paper we start with a discussion of some of the different denotations of the problem of corruption we then consider the ways in which the damaging consequences of corruption operate in a developing economy while not ignoring its possible redeeming features in some cases we pursue the question of why corruption is perceptibly so different in different societies and also persistent finally we examine the feasible policy issues that arise in this context

temporary work in coordinated market economies evidence from front line service workplaces the growing use of temporary contracts in europe raises the question of whether long term employment relations are eroding in coordinated market economies where protective regulations are historically strong this paper using data from establishment level surveys conducted in 2003 2005 examines the institutional and organizational factors that have shaped the extent of use of temporary contracts in call centers in six european countries austria denmark france germany spain and sweden while differences in regulatory regimes appear to have influenced employer behavior in some cases the exceptions are striking as the countries with the most stringent restrictions on temporary workers were among the heaviest users of such workers by contrast firm level strategies that retained work in house and invested in work force skills and training were consistent predictors of the use of long term contracts as opposed to temporary ones

how institutional and organizational characteristics explain the growth of contingent work in china china s traditional model of long term employment has been undermined by an increased reliance on nonrenewable fixed term and temporary agency employment contracts in this study the author draws

a controlled field experiment on corruption abstract this paper reports on a controlled field experiment on corruption designed to address two important issues the experimenter s scrutiny and the unobservability of corruption in the experiment a grader is offered a bribe along with a demand for a better grade we find that graders respond more favorably to bigger bribes while the effect of higher wages is ambiguous it lowers the bribe s acceptance but it fosters reciprocation monitoring and punishment can deter corruption but we cannot reject that it may also crowd out intrinsic motivations for honesty when intensified finally our results suggest several micro determinants of corruption including age ability religiosity but not gender

individuals and institutions what happens when political and economic forces interact in society recent developments in politics and economics focus attention on how outcomes are determined by the interaction between institutional structure and individual preferences specifying the rules of the game is often seen as a way of producing institution specific answers to how social decisions are made see e g david p baron and john ferejohn 1987 david austen smith and jeffrey banks 1988 baron 1991 in this tradition membership of the institution the set of players of the game is typically taken as given this paper proposes to endogenize the institutional structure by considering the case in which multiple institutions compete for members we present general definitions of equilibrium with multiple institutions and explore conditions for existence charles m tiebout s 1956 approach to the free rider problem demonstrates the application to local public goods there are several communities each of which has a political process for deciding the provision of its local public goods based on the preferences of its population in turn individuals reveal their preference for the provision of local public goods through their choice of a community the existence of an equilibrium in this context was first demonstrated by frank westhoff 1977 if communities use majority rule to determine their public goods and if preferences are single peaked then there exists an equilibrium in which each community follows the preference of its median member and each person belongs to his most preferred community in this paper we consider multidimensional choice problems political processes other than majority rule and other applications such as platform choice of political parties

bribery behavioral drivers of distorted decisions we experimentally investigate behavioral drivers of bribery focusing on the role of self interest reciprocity and moral costs associated with distorting judgment in our laboratory experiment two participants compete for a prize a referee picks the winner participants can bribe the referee when the referee can keep only the winner s bribe bribes distort her judgment when the referee keeps the bribes regardless of the winner bribes no longer influence her decision an experiment in an indian market confirms these results these findings imply that our participants are influenced by bribes out of self interest and not because of a desire to reciprocate further evidence shows that self interest guides decisions to a greater extent when referees have scope for avoiding the moral costs associated with distorting judgment as a result limiting referees ability to form self serving evaluations can significantly reduce the effectiveness of bribes less

how corruption may corrupt abstract the incidence of corruption appears to vary strongly across societies even for comparable activities the model highlights how the profitability of bureaucratic corruption may be related to its frequency and points toward a few mechanisms that can be used in explaining the stylized facts of varying incidence of corruption there might be multiple self fulfilling equilibria levels of corruption even when both supply and demand of corrupt acts are considered

a dynamic model of corruption deterrence abstract this paper presents a model of corruption deterrence with a simple overlapping generations structure built into it a crucial assumption is that when corruption becomes more prevalent in the economy it is harder to audit a corrupt official effectively it is shown that this assumption may give rise to several stationary equilibrium levels of corruption this possibility has been exploited to explain why sometimes a government may temporarily resort to an extremely severe deterrence policy and why the same deterrence scheme may imply quite different levels of corruption a case study is provided to give empirical support to the model

propensities to engage in and punish corrupt behavior experimental evidence from australia india indonesia and singapore abstract this paper examines cultural differences in individual decision making in a corruption game we define culture as an individual s accumulated experience shaped by the social institutional and economic aspects of the environment in which the individual lives based on experiments run in australia melbourne india delhi indonesia jakarta and singapore we find that there is a greater variation in the propensities to punish corrupt behavior than in the propensities to engage in corrupt behavior across cultures consistent with the existing corruption indices the subjects in india exhibit a higher tolerance of corruption than the subjects in australia however the subjects in singapore have a higher tolerance and the subjects in indonesia have much lower tolerance of corruption than expected we conjecture that this is due to the nature of the recent institutional changes in these two countries we also vary our experimental design to examine the impact of the perceived cost of bribery and find that the results are culture specific

decentralized management of common property resources experiments with a centuries old institution for centuries villages in the alps employed a special system for managing their common properties individual users could inspect other users at their own cost and impose a predetermined sanction a fine when a free rider was discovered the fine was paid to the user who found a violator experiments with the institutions demonstrate that this mechanism considerably improves efficiency of resource use the classical model of identical selfish agents does not capture the data as well as a model with heterogeneous and linear other regarding preferences altruism and especially potentially dysfunctional behavior such as spite and mistake play important positive roles

a free press is bad news for corruption abstract this paper tests the proposition that a free press may be a powerful control on corruption we find evidence of a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross section of countries this result is robust to specification and sample and the relationship is not sensitive to the choice of a particular measure of corruption or of press freedom furthermore we present evidence which suggests that the direction of causation runs from higher press freedom to lower corruption

corruption and culture an experimental analysis article i nfo article history why do some people choose corruption over honesty and others not do the social norms and values prevailing in the societies in which they grew up affect their decisions in 2005 we conducted a bribery experiment and found that among undergraduates we could predict who would act corruptly with reference to the level of corruption in their home country among graduate students we could not in 2007 we replicated our result and also found that time spent in the uk was associated with a decline in the propensity to bribe although this does not explain our inability to predict graduate behaviour we conclude that while corruption may in part be a cultural phenomenon individuals should not be prejudged with reference to their country of origin

the genesis and spread of economic corruption a microtheoretic interpretation abstract this paper argues that the ability to engage in corruption arises from the possession of quasi monopoly power or authority by one of the parties to corruption this authority is passed on routinely through delegation of functions in state and publicly owned enterprises or acquired by explicit or implicit contract with another party or by solemn promise to act in good faith corruption tends to spread by enlisting the support of more individuals within and across activities this support is needed to overcome risks to solve problems of indivisibility and to reap benefits of network externalities

condemning corruption while condoning inefficiency an experimental investigation into voting behavior this article reports results from an economic experiment that investigates the extent to which voters punish corruption and waste in elections while both are responsible for reductions in voters welfare they are not necessarily perceived as equally immoral the empirical literature in political agency has not yet dealt with these two dimensions of voters choice calculus our results suggest that morality and norms are indeed crucial for a superior voting equilibrium in systems with heterogeneous politicians while corruption always is punished self interest alone in the absence of norms leads to the acceptance and perpetuation of waste and social losses