Measuring Morality in the bribery Game

CARLOS MAXIMILIANO SENCI

Groningen

Seminario; Norms and Networks Cluster; 2012

Abbink, Irlenbusch and Renner (2002) pioneered the experimental study of corruption byproposing the Bribery Game (AIR-BG). Despite the general agreement about the involvement of amoral transgression in the characterization of corruption, it has been difficult to find clearevidence of the implication of the participant?s morality in their choices in the AIR-BG. With theaim of measuring the interaction between selfish monetary incentives and moral attitudes in anexperimental game of corruption, we present a variation of the AIR-BG in which participantscould choose among making no transaction, playing a Trust Game, or playing a Bribery Game(i.e., a Trust Game with a negative externality applied to a passive third party) after which weassessed their moral attitudes with the Mach IV scale. We implemented two independentframing treatments (N=127) in which participants encountered options with either abstract orcorruption-loaded labels. In addition, selfish monetary incentives in our Bribery Game wereincreased across within-subject conditions, whereas the payoffs for making no transaction or forplaying the Trust Game remained fixed. Results showed that both potential bribers and potentialbribees were significantly less prone to choose the corrupt transaction in the loaded frame thanin the abstract frame. In addition, the tendency for corruption increased as the selfish monetaryincentives involved in the corrupt transaction increased across conditions. Mach scores werepositively correlated with corruption proneness only for potential bribers in the loaded frame.We discuss these findings in terms of the internal validity of laboratory experiments ofcorruption.