El efecto de las normas prescriptivas y las externalidades sobre decisiones de coimas

FREIDIN, E.

Congreso; VIII Congreso Nacional de Estudiantes de Posgrado en Economía; 2017

Departamento de Economía, Universidad Nacional del Sur

In mostBribery Games (BGs) in the literature, there is no mention of rights and dutiesassociated to participants´ roles. Authors have hitherto relied on loadedframes, negative externalities, and the possibility of sanctions to implicitlysignal prescriptive norms. We argue that participants´ interpretation of thesefactors may not be univocal. In the present study, a participant in the role ofa common citizen either did or did not acquire the right to obtain a monetarybenefit, and could offer a bribe to an associated participant in the role ofpublic official. This participant, in turn, had an explicit duty of providingthe benefit only if the citizen acquired the right to it. Conditions with/withoutthe acquisition of the right were crossed with the presence/absence of negativeexternalities associated with transgressions of the official´s duty. One last (fifth)condition mimicked other BGs in the literature which rely on loaded frames andnegative externalities but no information on rights and duties. We found thatboth the presence of externalities and information about rights were effectivebribery deterrents, and that bribe offers and acceptances were most discouragedwith their synergic effect. Interestingly, officials followed prescriptiveinformation even when it was inefficient to do so (when there were noexternalities), and implied choosing against their material self-interest (byrejecting a bribe), and not reciprocating bribe offers. We conclude byhighlighting the limits of making generalizations from results without explicitnormative information, and the relevance of present findings as anti-corruptionbehavioral insights.