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RSS0010.1177/1043463119853893Rationality and SocietySenci et al.

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Rationality and Society

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on bribery decisions in
the lab

Carlos Maximiliano Senci

Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur (IIESS), CONICET Bahía Blanca,
Argentina; Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina

Hipólito Hasrun
Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina

Rodrigo Moro
Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur (IIESS), CONICET Bahía Blanca,
Argentina; Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina

Esteban Freidin
Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur (IIESS), CONICET Bahía Blanca,
Argentina

Abstract
In most bribery games in the literature, there is no mention of rights and duties
associated to participants’ roles. Authors have hitherto relied on loaded frames,
negative externalities, and the possibility of sanctions to implicitly signal prescriptive
norms. We argue that participants’ interpretation of these factors may not be

Corresponding author:
Rodrigo Moro, Departamento de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca,
B8000FTN, Argentina.
Email: rmoro@uns.edu.ar
2 Rationality and Society 00(0)

univocal. In this study, a participant in the role of a common citizen either did or
did not acquire the right to obtain a monetary benefit and could offer a bribe to
an associated participant in the role of public official. This participant, in turn, had
an explicit duty of providing the benefit only if the citizen acquired the right to it.
Conditions with/without the acquisition of the right were crossed with the presence/
absence of negative externalities associated with transgressions of the official’s
duty. One last (fifth) condition mimicked other bribery games in the literature
which rely on loaded frames and negative externalities but no information on rights
and duties. We found that both the presence of externalities and information about
rights were effective bribery deterrents, and that bribe offers and acceptances
were most discouraged with their synergic effect. Interestingly, officials followed
prescriptive information even when it was inefficient to do so (when there were no
externalities), and implied choosing against their material self-interest (by rejecting
a bribe), and not reciprocating bribe offers. We conclude by highlighting the limits
of making generalizations from results without explicit normative information and
the relevance of present findings as anti-corruption behavioral insights.

Keywords
Bribery game, corruption, duties, morals, rights, social norms

Introduction
Based on gift-exchange games, bribery games (BGs) typically feature an
interaction between two players. The first mover can offer a transfer to an
associated participant, who can accept it and reciprocate, or reject it and not
favor the former player. When framed with loaded terms, the first mover
could be called a “common citizen” or “firm,” and the second mover a
“public official.” A key element of the game is that accepting the transfer
and its subsequent reciprocation generates a net monetary cost upon a third
party. This feature attempts to mimic negative externalities associated to
corruption (Abbink et al., 2002; Barr and Serra, 2009; Cameron et al.,
2009). This collusive type of bribery can be contrasted against the extortive
type, where it is the public official who demands a bribe to provide a benefit
(see Abbink et al., 2014). We here focus on the former.
In most BGs in the literature, the formal norms prescribing participants’
decisions are not explicit, that is, there is no mention of rights and duties asso-
ciated to participants’ roles (Abbink et al., 2002; Barr and Serra, 2009; Cameron
et al., 2009; see Banerjee, 2016 for an exception). Many experimental settings
nonetheless include some features that may implicitly indicate the presence of
prescriptive norms, such as word framing, negative externalities, and the risk
of sanctions. We here argue, however, that participants’ interpretation of these
Senci et al. 3

factors may not be univocal (as we discuss in the next section). In turn, this
state of affairs may contrast with many of the real-world situations represented
by these BGs which do present univocal prescriptive norms. Examples abound
from the policeman who is about to give a traffic ticket and is liable to be
bribed by the transgressor who may want to avoid the fine to the official in the
passport office who demands a bribe from a rightful citizen. In these situations,
the normative expectation is that the official’s behavior is rule-governed by
legal norms. Moreover, the rule that bounds the public official’s behavior is
linked to the citizen’s normative status, that is, whether the citizen has a cor-
responding right (e.g. to obtain the passport) or he or she is at fault and does not
have such a right (e.g. for a traffic violation).
The first goal of this study is to propose a way to incorporate explicit
rights and duties (i.e. prescriptive norms) in a BG. In doing so, we are trying
to improve the ecological validity of experimental studies on bribery, or at
least to represent those situations where prescriptive norms are indeed sali-
ent elements of the situation. We believe that the explicit representation of
norms matter, because, beyond being a prominent element in many real-
world scenarios, people may behave differently when norms are made sali-
ent (Bicchieri and Xiao, 2009; Cialdini et al., 2006, 1990; Krupka and
Weber, 2009). Indeed, recent studies suggest that people may exhibit a gen-
eralized preference for moral behavior, which implies that they gain utility
for doing “the right thing” beyond preferences for economic outcomes
(Capraro and Rand, 2018; Tappin and Capraro, 2018). The second goal of
this article is to test whether the incorporation of explicit prescriptive norms
has any influence on participants’ decisions to offer or to accept bribes rela-
tive to the hitherto standard BG with implicit norms. This comparison will
illuminate the limits of generalizations between contexts with implicit and
explicit norms, and it may suggest a potentially effective dimension to ori-
ent anti-corruption policies, namely, putting emphasis in making relevant
norms more explicit and salient. Finally, we are interested in assessing
whether people follow prescriptive norms when transgressions involve or
do not involve negative externalities. We conceive at least two compliance
mechanisms: (1) some kind of heuristic process such that, if a prescriptive
norm is explicitly presented as applying to the situation, individuals just
tend to follow it (i.e. a normative heuristic; Baron, 1994; Sunstein, 2005);
and (2) a consequentialist evaluation such that compliance results from
individuals’ recognition that norm transgressions lead to an undesirable
state of the world (e.g. see Fehr and Schmidt, 1999, for a model of such an
outcome-oriented other-regarding preference). In the real world, both
mechanisms may be interwoven, so it may be hard to tell their relative
importance in determining compliance. In this study, we disentangled their
4 Rationality and Society 00(0)

effects by systematically varying the presence or absence of negative exter-

nalities as a consequence of the official’s transgression of her explicit duty,
while also having a condition with negative externalities but no explicit
norm.
In the present procedure, participants in the role of citizens performed a
real-effort task to obtain a normative status, namely, whether they earned
the right to a monetary benefit (we exogenously varied this factor, thus hav-
ing Right and NoRight conditions; see more details in section “The present
study”). Importantly, the benefit was not automatically obtained but had to
be provided by the official. After being informed about her own perfor-
mance and consequent status, the citizen could offer a bribe to the official,
which was then informed about the citizen’s normative status and whether
the citizen offered a bribe. Only then, the official had to decide whether to
grant the benefit to the citizen. In this context, the official’s duty was explic-
itly stated (i.e. to provide the benefit if and only if the citizen acquired the
right to it), and we systematically varied whether there was a negative exter-
nality associated to the violation of that duty (Externality and NoExternality
conditions).
Besides the four basic conditions resulting from the combination of the
citizen’s normative status (right/no right) and the presence/absence of exter-
nalities, we ran a fifth condition where no normative information was pro-
vided (no explicit rights and duties). This condition was similar to BGs in
the literature, in which the negative externality was associated to the offi-
cial’s provision of the benefit to the citizen or firm (Abbink et al., 2002;
Barr and Serra, 2009; Cameron et al., 2009) and served as a baseline against
which to assess the effect of making detailed prescriptive norms explicit.
Present results showed that making the citizen’s normative status and the
official’s duty explicit had a significant influence on participants’ decisions.
For participants in the role of citizens, the presence of negative externalities
in the condition in which citizens did not acquire the right to the benefit led
to significantly fewer bribe offers than in the rest of the conditions, thus
showing the combined deterrent efficacy of explicit norms and negative
externalities. For participants in the role of officials, informing the official
about her duty lowered the provision of undeserved benefits, even when
officials had been bribed and there were no externalities involved and thus
the provision of the benefit was efficiency enhancing. This last result sug-
gests that norm compliance triumphed over self-interest, reciprocity, and
efficiency concerns in the present context.
The rest of the manuscript proceeds as follows: the reader will find a
review of the experimental literature of corruption and social norms in sec-
tion “Experimental studies of bribery and relevant social norms”, including
Senci et al. 5

a detailed justification of present goals. Section “The present study” gives a

methodological presentation of our study. Section “Behavioral predictions”
introduces behavioral predictions for the present protocol and experimental
conditions, followed by the results in section “Results”. Finally, we con-
clude with a discussion of present findings in section “Discussion”.

Experimental studies of bribery and relevant

social norms
We here analyze three different features authors have used to add normative
information to bribery experiments. These features include the use of (1)
loaded wording in the game instructions, (2) negative externalities, and (3)
sanctions, as rules of the game. In this section, we argue that these features
do not unambiguously signal the intended norms, and, therefore, may lead
to different decisions as participants differ in their interpretation.
Before considering each feature individually, let us establish what we
consider to be the key norm in a bribery situation in which the official must
decide whether to provide the citizen with a benefit. The explicit norm
would say something like this: if the citizen deserves the benefit, the public
official should grant the citizen the benefit; and alternatively, if the citizen
does not deserve the benefit, the public official should not grant the benefit.
Let us analyze how the three elements commonly used to make norms sali-
ent in BGs (loaded frames, externalities, and sanctions) contribute in delin-
eating the above-mentioned norm.
First, authors have used loaded wording in the instructions of the game
to create a normative frame. For instance, participants’ roles and abstract
labels attached to decision options were replaced by colloquial roles and
terms that could be easily linked to corruption. For example, Abbink and
Hennig-Schmidt (2006) introduced first and second movers’ roles as “firm”
and “public official,” respectively, and changed the labels associated with
decision options to “private payment” and “grant permission.” A similar
framing strategy has been followed in a number of other papers (Abbink
et al., 2014; Barr et al., 2009; Barr and Serra, 2009; Chaudhuri et al., 2016),
even using a very direct word such as “bribe” in some (Alatas et al., 2009;
Banerjee, 2016; Cameron et al., 2009).
The problem we see is that a loaded framing of roles and actions does not
include any specification of participants’ rights and duties. The reader may
initially think that if the citizen has to offer a bribe to obtain a benefit, it
means that the citizen does not deserve it (does not have the right to obtain
the benefit). However, there are many real-world situations in which, even
if an agent has the right to a benefit (e.g. acquisition of a passport or a bed
6 Rationality and Society 00(0)

in a hospital), it may be hard to get it without a bribe (this could be espe-

cially true in corruption-prone countries; see, for example, Bertrand et al.,
2007, for a field experimental example, and Banerjee, 2016, for a laboratory
instance). In this sense, the loaded frames used so far present ambiguities in
terms of the rights and duties associated to participants’ roles, and therefore,
participants may differ in their normative interpretation of BGs. This criti-
cism is consistent with the mixed findings in the literature. For instance,
Barr and Serra (2009) found a significant difference in behavior between
abstract and loaded frames, but only for citizens, and not for officials, and
only in a condition with high externalities, but not when externalities were
low; other studies, on the contrary, found that participants’ bribery decisions
did not differ between abstract and loaded frames (Abbink and Hennig-
Schmidt, 2006; Banerjee, 2016; Cameron et al., 2009). In the present exper-
iment, we compared a condition similar to some framed BGs in the literature
to conditions with the same framing and additional information about rights
and duties. This allowed us to evaluate the limits of just using loaded word-
ing of roles and actions in order to transmit information about more detailed
prescriptive norms.
Second, the majority of experimental studies on bribery introduce some
form of negative externality associated to corruption (Abbink et al., 2002;
Alatas et al., 2009; Barr and Serra, 2009; Cameron et al., 2009; Lambsdorff
and Frank, 2010; Schulze and Frank, 2003). The presence of negative exter-
nalities following a certain action could make participants interpret that
action as harmful and, thus, socially inappropriate. Indeed, the avoidance of
harm has been shown to be a moral concern in many societies and cultures
(Gray et al., 2012; Haidt, 2007). Notwithstanding, we here argue that,
although counter-normative activities, such as corruption, entail negative
externalities most of the time, there are also normative activities (e.g. driv-
ing kids to school) which do so as well (e.g. traffic congestion). This makes
the interpretation of externalities far from univocal. Of course, many authors
pose that the negative externalities of corruption are inefficient (e.g. Rose-
Ackerman, 2006). Nonetheless, evidence from bribery experiments sug-
gests that people may not always be sensitive to such changes in efficiency
(Cameron et al., 2009). Even more, an economic or market framing may
make people more tolerant to harm-producing activities, even without
changes in monetary efficiency (Falk and Szech, 2013). Therefore, we here
argue that negative externalities do not serve to unambiguously signal coun-
ter-normative actions, less so in the context of economic exchanges. Indeed,
the extent to which people respond to negative externalities has not been
clearly established in the literature of bribery experiments. For instance,
Barr and Serra (2009) found fewer bribe offers when externalities were high
Senci et al. 7

rather than low, but variation in externalities did not affect bribe accept-
ances. Moreover, these results were only evident under a loaded frame, but
not under abstract roles and labels (Barr and Serra, 2009). In turn, Abbink
et al. (2002) could not find any effect of negative externalities on bribery
decisions in a repeated-rounds game. In this study, we had conditions with
explicit normative information both with and without negative externalities,
and without explicit norms but with negative externalities. The comparison
among these conditions allowed assessing the limits of negative externali-
ties in transmitting a more complete normative landscape.
Third and last, the use of sanctions in bribery experiments, it may be
argued, introduces normative demands. The norm expressive function of
punishment has a long standing in law and economics (Cooter, 1998; Funk,
2007; Galbiati et al., 2013; Galbiati and Vertova, 2008; Kahan, 1998; Kube
and Traxler, 2011; McAdams, 2017; Masclet et al., 2003; Sunstein, 1996;
Tyran and Feld, 2006; Weibull and Villa, 2005). The idea is that, besides
motivating people to avoid the consequences of punishment, the expressive
function of sanctions helps informing people about the prescription or pro-
scription of certain actions. In the context of BGs, despite sanctions inform-
ing participants that targeted actions are socially inappropriate, sanctions on
their own leave rights and duties underspecified. For instance, in their pio-
neering BG, Abbink et al. (2002) implemented a sudden death condition in
which a random probability determined whether partners would lose all
their points after the second mover accepted the first mover’s bribe offer.
Note that this situation is ambiguous in terms of rights and duties. The sanc-
tion may signal that the first mover does not deserve the benefit, or, instead,
simply that accepting a bribe is inappropriate (regardless of the first mov-
er’s normative status). In addition, the second mover’s duty regarding the
provision of the benefit to the first mover is unclear; she may get sanctioned
for providing the benefit only if she accepts a bribe, but not otherwise. In
turn, Alatas et al. (2009) and Cameron et al. (2009) implemented a BG in
which the third party (in the role of a common citizen) who experienced the
negative externalities of collusive bribery between a firm and an official
could punish them. Punishment was only possible when a bribe was offered
and accepted; therefore, as with Abbink et al.’s BG just discussed, the pos-
sibility of sanctions in this BG was again normatively ambiguous in terms
of the rights and duties associated to each role. Finally, at the level of behav-
ior, people’s response to the possibility of sanctions does not necessarily
indicate a reaction to inferred norms. Instead, people may avoid certain
actions simply because they entail the possibility of punishment.
In brief, we here argue that the three main channels hitherto employed by
experimenters to induce a meaningful normative context in BGs (framing,
8 Rationality and Society 00(0)

externalities, and sanctions) may fall short in adequately specifying the

rights and duties associated to specific roles in the game. Based on this, we
stress the need to introduce changes in the framing of BGs in order to test
whether these missing features, present in many bribery-related real-world
scenarios, are actually effective in modulating economic decisions.

The present study

The goal of this study was to assess the effect of detailed prescriptive infor-
mation and negative externalities as causes of norm compliance in a collu-
sive BG. In this context, roles, rights, and duties were clearly stated, and
negative externalities were experienced by a passive third party.

Participants and protocols

The experiment was conducted in the Decision Research Lab at the Southern
Institute of Social and Economic Research (IIESS, Spanish acronym),
(Argentine) Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET,
Spanish acronym), Bahía Blanca, Argentina. Present protocols were
reviewed and approved by the Bioethical Committee of the Hospital
Municipal “Dr. Leónidas Lucero,” Bahía Blanca, Argentina. We ran the
experiment during the first semester of 2016, in 12 sessions which had
between 12 and 20 participants each. The game was implemented using
zTree (Fischbacher, 2007). We did not use deception, and all decisions were
monetarily incentivized.
Participants were recruited by email from a subject pool which included
undergraduate and graduate students from the Universidad Nacional del Sur
and other higher education institutions from Bahía Blanca. In the email
invitation, we mentioned the range of possible earnings (AR$50–1101), as
well as the approximate duration of the session (90 minutes). Subjects par-
ticipated only once, in the role of either citizen or public official. While
entering the lab, participants blindly picked a PC number from a bag which
determined their role.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of two roles (citizen and
public official—hereafter, the latter simply called “official”), whereas a
local conservationist NGO experienced the inefficient negative externalities
of corruption (i.e. a drastic decrease in the experimenters’ donation). As it
has been done by others before (e.g. Lambsdorff and Frank, 2010), we
decided to use a conservationist NGO to experience and represent the inef-
ficient negative externalities of corruption, because people typically endorse
environmental values promoted by such institutions. Therefore, it was
Senci et al. 9

Figure 1.  Representation of the three stages involved in the present one-shot
collusive bribery game for conditions Right and NoRight.

highly likely that participants interpreted these externalities as socially

undesirable, which is the case with negative externalities of corruption in
the real world (Bertrand et al., 2007; Mauro, 1995). In the written instruc-
tions, participants were briefly introduced to the goals of this organization
named Tellus (see an English version of the instructions in Online Resource
1). In turn, in post-decision questionnaires (Online Resource 2), we asked
them whether they had heard of Tellus before, whether they endorsed its
goals, and whether they had donated money to Tellus before: 95% of partici-
pants endorsed Tellus’ goals, which suggests that a donation to Tellus was
regarded as a pro-social action for present participants. In addition, only
11% had heard of Tellus before their participation in the experiment, and
only 3% had donated money to Tellus.

Experimental conditions and game stages

Across between-subject conditions in a 2 × 2 design, we systematically
varied whether the citizen acquired the right to a monetary benefit (i.e. we
varied the citizen’s normative status), and whether there was a negative
externality associated to the official’s violation of his or her duty. We had a
fifth independent condition where there was no information on rights and
duties, but there was a negative externality associated to the official’s provi-
sion of the benefit to the citizen. Thus, overall, we had five independent
conditions: (1) Right_Externality condition (n  = 42), (2) NoRight_
Externality condition (n = 44), (3) Right_NoExternality condition (n = 38),
(4) NoRight_NoExternality condition (n = 38), and (5) NoNorm_Externality
condition (n = 40).
Figure 1 shows a schematic representation of the three stages involved in
the one-shot BG used here. In all conditions, the game began with the citi-
zen having 120 seconds to perform a real-effort task, which consisted of
10 Rationality and Society 00(0)

counting the number of letters “a” in a two-paragraph text (stage 1; the text
comprised 281 words, or 1512 characters, 145 of which were letters “a”). In
conditions with normative information (Right and NoRight), we systemati-
cally varied the successful-performance threshold through which the citizen
acquired his or her normative status (the right to a monetary benefit). In
Right conditions, the successful-performance threshold was very low (the
tolerated error to consider performance successful was ±75 units) so that
almost all citizens acquired the right. In such a case, the officials’ explicit
duty was to provide the benefit. We had to discard four citizens and their
corresponding officials from Right conditions because they did not show a
successful performance in the effort task of stage 1. In turn, in NoRight
conditions, the successful-performance threshold was very high (the toler-
ated error to consider performance successful was ±2 units) so that almost
all citizens did not acquire the right. In such a case, the officials’ explicit
duty was not to provide the benefit. We had to discard two citizens and their
corresponding officials from NoRight conditions because they did show a
successful performance in the effort task of stage 1. Statistical analyses
were done with the following sample sizes per condition: Right_Externality
(n = 40), NoRight_Externality (n = 40), Right_NoExternality (n = 32),
NoRight_NoExternality (n = 36), and NoNorm_Externality (n = 40).
In the NoNorm condition, the initial effort task had no consequences
upon subsequent stages of the game (participants knew this) and, therefore,
citizens did not have any normative status and officials no explicit duty. In
stage 2, after being informed about their performance and corresponding
normative status, citizens had to make a monetary transfer to their corre-
sponding official (a randomly associated participant in the room). In the
NoNorm condition, there was no information about any normative status
and participants knew that performance information would only be pro-
vided at the end of the game. In the instructions and relevant screens for all
conditions, we specified that the transfer in stage 2 represented an adminis-
trative fee of $2 which was the minimal transfer admitted, but that they
could transfer more if they wished (i.e. up to $40, which was the amount of
the benefit the citizen could obtain). The transfer amount came from citi-
zens’ initial endowment of $52. In stage 3, each official was informed about
the normative status of the corresponding citizen (only in conditions with
normative information) and the transfer amount received from him or her
(in all conditions). The amount transferred was presented as comprising the
$2-administrative fee and a “surplus” (i.e. a bribe, if there was one). If there
was no bribe, the official had a simple choice between providing or not
providing the $40-benefit to the citizen (the benefit amount did not come
from the official’s endowment—which was initially $68—as if it came from
Senci et al. 11

public funds). If there was a bribe (i.e. a transfer >2), the official could
accept it, which automatically implied providing the $40-benefit to the citi-
zen or reject it and decide whether to provide the benefit or not (the official
could not accept the bribe and not provide the benefit; see Figure 1).2
Approximately a random half of participants in Right and NoRight con-
ditions were assigned to the Externality condition (n = 86), whereas the
other half were assigned to the NoExternality condition (n = 76). In turn, the
NoNorm condition (n = 40) did involve externalities with the aim of having
a treatment similar to other BGs in the literature (Barr and Serra, 2009;
Cameron et al., 2009). In all conditions, externalities were implemented as
a drastic and inefficient decrease in the experimenters’ donation to Tellus, a
local conservationist NGO: from $50 to $5, that is, a $45 loss compared to
the citizen’s $40 gain for receiving the benefit. For each pair of participants,
a negative externality was caused by the official’s decision in the game: in
conditions with normative information, externalities were caused by the
official’s transgression of his or her duty, which was to provide the $40-ben-
efit if and only if the citizen had acquired the right to it (this was informed
both in written instructions and relevant screens for both roles). In the
NoNorm condition, externalities were simply caused by the official’s provi-
sion of the benefit to the citizen (this implementation of externalities in the
NoNorm condition was similar to other BGs in the literature (Abbink et al.,
2002; Barr and Serra, 2009; Cameron et al., 2009). In addition, all condi-
tions had the same loaded wording in reference to roles as “citizen” and
“official,” and to the bribe as a “surplus,” which was also similar to loaded
frames implemented in other BGs (Abbink and Hennig-Schmidt, 2006; Barr
and Serra, 2009). However, the NoNorm condition had no information
about the citizen’s normative status or the official’s duty, hence served as
baseline (representative of other loaded BGs in the literature) against which
to assess whether more specific and detailed normative information could
affect decisions.
When the game ended, participants completed several post-decision
questionnaires, which also included providing socio-demographic informa-
tion (Online Resource 2). Finally, participants were sequentially called by
their PC-terminal number, and each was privately handed a closed envelop
with his or her earnings in cash inside.3

Behavioral predictions
In this study, we attempted to disentangle whether people respond to a norm
because of its function and consequences (i.e. avoiding negative externali-
ties), or because of its content, namely, the mere presence of prescriptive
12 Rationality and Society 00(0)

information (rights and duties). Some predictions derived from these two
hypotheses contrast with each other and are also in contrast with predictions
derived from selfish rationality as we explain below.

Selfish rationality
Since the provision of the benefit was costless to the official, and accepting
any bribe automatically implied its provision, the citizen had an incentive to
send the minimal possible bribe (i.e. $1). If the official was selfishly rational,
then she would accept any bribe >0, and thus provide the benefit. This
hypothesis did not predict any difference among conditions.

Moral consequentialism
This hypothesis could take different flavors depending on whether the citi-
zen and the official were sensitive to causing negative externalities, and/or
the citizen believed the official was sensitive to causing externalities.
Through preferences or beliefs, this hypothesis predicts that the proportion
of bribe offers and bribe acceptances (or more generally, benefit provisions)
should be lower in conditions where the provision of the benefit led to nega-
tive externalities (i.e. less bribery in NoRight_Externality condition and
NoNorm_Externality condition than in the remaining conditions).

Normative heuristic
Contrary to consequentialist models which emphasize the attunement of
decisions to the consequences of each choice, the heuristic approach
assumes that participants rely on “fast and frugal” rules that guide their
behavior in a more or less unreflective way (Gigerenzer et al., 1999; Rand
et al., 2014). If this is the case and, therefore, citizens and officials respond
to norms as if they were rules, or citizens expect officials to respond in such
a way, then the proportion of bribe offers and bribe acceptances (or more
generally, benefit provisions) should be lower in conditions where provid-
ing the benefit explicitly goes against a rule, independently of consequences
(i.e. less bribery in conditions NoRight_Externality and NoRight_
NoExternality than in the remaining conditions).

Double criterion
Finally, it is possible that norms and consequences interact in their effect on
people’s decisions. This could be so because the presence of negative
Senci et al. 13

Figure 2.  Proportion of bribe offers as a function of condition.

externalities could be more or less tolerated depending on the norms in

place (Barr and Serra, 2009; Falk and Szech, 2013; Fershtman et al., 2012).
Indeed, negative externalities are part of the accepted consequences in cer-
tain contexts, such as it is the case, for example, with sports competitions or
other sum-zero situations (Fershtman et al., 2012). In the context of corrup-
tion, the probability of refraining from it may increase when the possibility
of causing negative externalities is associated with an explicit relevant norm
against it (Alekseev et al., 2017; Barr and Serra, 2009). On the contrary, the
absence of explicit norms may allow self-serving interpretations of what is
appropriate in a given context (Ariely, 2012). If we apply this double-crite-
rion hypothesis to the present game, we predict that the proportion of bribe
offers and bribe acceptances (or more generally, benefit provisions) should
be the lowest in the NoRight_Externality condition.

Results
Citizens
Figure 2 shows the proportion of bribes offered by citizens as a function of
condition. The percentage of bribe offers was lower in NoRight_Externality
condition (45%) than in NoRight_NoExternality condition (80%) (Fisher’s
exact test, p < 0.05), showing an effect of negative externalities on citizens’
decisions. In addition, 85% of citizens in NoNorm_Externality condition
offered bribes which, against the 45% of bribes in NoRight_Externality con-
dition (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.05), shows citizens’ sensitivity to normative
information as well. In short, citizens behaved as predicted by the double-
criterion hypothesis in the sense that they most strongly refrained from
14 Rationality and Society 00(0)

Table 1.  Coefficients (standard errors) from Tobit regressions of citizens’

decisions (whether to bribe).

(1) (2) (3)

Right (= 1)—NoRight (= 0) –0.34 (0.49) –0.34 (0.55) –0.34 (0.50)
Externality (= 1)—NoExternality (= 0) –1.17 (0.45)* –1.21 (0.49)* –1.17 (0.47)*
Right–Externality interaction 1.38 (0.65)* 1.23 (0.71) 1.39 (0.67)*
Appropriateness of offer (1 = very 0.40 (0.13)**  
inappropriate; 5 = very appropriate)
Estimation of % of corrupt officials 0.00 (0.01)

*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.

offering bribes when citizens had not acquired the right to the benefit and
obtaining the benefit was associated with causing negative externalities.
The reported effects of prescriptive information and externalities on
citizens’ decisions could mean that citizens themselves were sensitive
to those normative elements and/or that they expected officials to be
sensitivity to them. The information provided by citizens in the post-
decision questionnaires helped disentangling these possibilities. A
Probit regression of bribe offers as dependent variable showed a sig-
nificant predictive effect of citizens’ rating of the appropriateness of
offering a bribe in the game, whereas citizens’ estimation of the per-
centage of officials who would accept a bribe turned out not to be a
significant predictor of bribe offers (see Table 1). Even more, the inclu-
sion of appropriateness ratings in the regression made the Right–
Externality interaction to become non-significant. This suggests that
variation in citizens’ own moral sensitivity to bribing may have under-
lied variation in bribe offers.
Also worth noting is that citizens in Right conditions (white bars in
Figure 2) offered bribes in 75% of cases on average, which is not signifi-
cantly different from the highest bribery frequency in the experiment (80%;
see Figure 2) (Fisher’s exact test, p > 0.1). A possible explanation involves
the notion of reciprocity. On one hand, bribery could be an instance of citi-
zens’ intention to secure their rightful benefit by appealing to the official’s
positive reciprocity after receiving the bribe. On the other hand, if the citi-
zen thought that the official was expecting a bribe, bribing could be
intended not to disappoint the official’s expectations and avoid triggering
his or her negative reciprocity. The citizen’s expectations of reciprocity
from the official could parallel beliefs triggered in Ultimatum Games
(Banerjee, 2016; Guth et al., 1982), or even harassment bribe contexts
(Abbink et al., 2014; Banerjee, 2016).
Senci et al. 15

Figure 3.  Proportion of officials who provided the benefit to the citizen as a
function of condition.

In terms of bribe amounts (i.e. transfers >$2), we found no systematic

variation among conditions (Kruskal–Wallis analysis of variance (ANOVA)
by ranks, χ2 = 2.73, df = 4, p = 0.60).

Public officials
Figure 3 shows the proportion of officials who provided the $40-benefit to
the citizen as a function of condition. Similarly to citizens, officials were
affected by normative information, but less so by the possibility of produc-
ing negative externalities.
In terms of the normative effect, the overall majority of officials granted
the benefit when it was deserved (95% in Right conditions, taken together)
and denied it when it was not deserved (21% granted benefits in NoRight
conditions, taken together; Right vs NoRight, Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.001).
This normative pattern occurred even when officials were offered bribes:
96% versus 23% of benefits granted when officials were bribed in Right
versus NoRight conditions, respectively (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.001).
Interestingly, this meant that officials rejected bribes in 77% of occasions in
NoRight conditions (89% in NoRight_Externality condition and 71% in
NoRight_NoExternality condition; Fisher’s exact test, p > 0.1). Pair con-
trasts between individual conditions also showed a normative effect on
decisions. Benefit provisions were significantly more frequent in Right_
NoExternality condition than in NoRight_NoExternality condition (Fisher’s
exact test, p < 0.05); there were also more benefits granted in Right_
Externality condition than in NoRight_Externality condition (Fisher’s exact
test, p < 0.05); finally, there were also more benefit provisions in NoNorm_
Externality condition than in NoRight_Externality condition (Fisher’s exact
test, p < 0.05). The effect of normative information of Officials’ decisions
16 Rationality and Society 00(0)

Table 2.  Coefficients (standard errors) from Tobit regressions of officials’

decisions (whether to grant the benefit to the citizen).

(1) (2)
Right (= 1)—NoRight (= 0) 2.27 (0.60)*** 3.21 (0.86)***
Externality (= 1)—NoExternality (= 0) –0.85 (0.58) –0.86 (0.67)
Right–Externality interaction 1.00 (0.90) 0.22 (1.02)
Reception of an offer (bribe) 1.29 (0.66)*
Appropriateness of offer acceptance 0.47 (0.24)*
(1 = very inappropriate; 5 = very appropriate)

*p < 0.05, ***p < 0.001.

was confirmed by Probit regressions, even after controlling for bribe offers,
as Table 2 shows. Noteworthy, despite the overall normative behavior of
officials, bribe offers did increase the probability of benefit provisions (see
Table 2).
In terms of participants’ sensitivity to causing harm, officials provided
fewer benefits when doing so caused an externality than when it did not (5%
vs 29% of granted benefits in NoRight_Externality condition vs NoRight_
NoExternality condition, respectively; Fisher’s exact test, p = 0.05; see the
black bars in Figure 3). However, it is possible that officials were less prone
to grant benefits not because of their sensitivity to causing externalities but,
in part, because they received fewer bribes in the former than the latter con-
dition (see Figure 1). Indeed, the factor “Externality-NoExternality” was not
a significant predictor of benefit provisions in Probit regressions reported in
Table 2. When considering only the benefits provided after bribe offers, 11%
versus 29% of officials granted benefits in NoRight_Externality condition
versus NoRight_NoExternality condition, respectively (Fisher’s exact test,
p = 0.29). The trend in this last result is similar, though turned not significant,
to that obtained without discriminating for bribery. All in all, officials gener-
ally behaved according to the normative heuristic hypothesis, providing the
benefit when deserved and refusing its provision when undeserved.
Nevertheless, as it occurred with citizens, the strongest anti-corruption effect
was found when both a negative externality and an explicit prescriptive norm
were in place (i.e. in NoRight_Externality condition; see Figure 3).

Discussion
Bribery experiments can have a clear practical goal of finding ways to
fight corruption (Abbink and Serra, 2012). In this sense, it seems impor-
tant to experimentally study the underlying mechanisms of norm
Senci et al. 17

compliance by which both citizens and public officials are deterred from
corrupt exchanges, such as bribery. In this study, we found evidence sup-
porting two different norm-compliance mechanisms, which, in turn,
showed synergies.

Sensitivity to causing negative externalities

First, we evaluated whether participants’ choices took into consideration
how much others lose as a consequence of their decisions. When there were
negative externalities associated with obtaining/providing the benefit, citi-
zens were less prone to offer bribes and officials were less likely to provide
the benefit. This overall pattern of benefit provisions across conditions
remained similar, even when considering officials’ behavior after bribe
attempts. Officials’ sensitivity to causing negative externalities cannot be
conclusively supported by present results though. In the case of Right con-
ditions, treatments with and without externalities both presented almost
complete compliance with the available norm. Therefore, a ceiling effect of
norms could have forbidden the possibility of observing a higher proportion
of benefit provisions in Right_Externality than in Right_NoExternality. In
the case of NoRight conditions, officials in the NoRight_Externality condi-
tion did indeed provided significantly less benefits than those from
NoRight_NoExternality conditions; however, this difference cannot be uni-
vocally interpreted as being the result of participants’ concern for causing
externalities, because such difference could stem from the higher bribe fre-
quency in the NoExternality condition. A similar experiment using the strat-
egy method—thus allowing the expression of officials’ decisions with and
without bribery—, instead of the direct-response method used here, would
help confirm the effect of externalities on officials’ decisions.
In short, with the caveats just mentioned, we provisionally conclude that
the possibility of inflicting a material loss on others inhibited bribery in the
present protocol. This effect was more clearly seen for participants in the
role of citizens than those in the role of officials. This is consistent with
results from Barr and Serra (2009) who found that high (relative to low)
negative externalities reduced bribe offers, but not bribe acceptances, in a
one-shot BG with a loaded frame similar to the current NoNorm_Externality
condition. This effect of negative externalities was not present when their
game was framed in abstract terms, which coincides with results from
Abbink et al. (2002) who did not find any effect of negative externalities on
participants’ decisions in a collusive BG with repeated-rounds framed in
abstract terms. Together, results from these studies suggest increased
18 Rationality and Society 00(0)

sensitivity to externalities in the presence of consistent prescriptive norms.

We further discuss the effect of normative information below.

Compliance with prescriptive norms

Second, we found supporting evidence for a compliance mechanism based
on just going with what the prescriptive norm commands. More specifically,
participants in both roles were sensitive to the presence of information
about the citizen’s normative status and the corresponding official’s duty.
For citizens, this was evident only in conditions with externalities, where
the percentage of bribes offered was much lower in the NoRight condition
than in Right and NoNorm conditions (see the three bars in the left-hand
side of Figure 2). Specially telling is the difference in bribe offers between
conditions NoRight_Externality and NoNorm_Externality (45% vs 80%,
respectively). This difference shows the inhibitory effect of an explicit nor-
mative status compared to a baseline without explicit normative informa-
tion. The effect of normative information was even more impressive for
officials, who tended to follow the norm of not providing the benefit to citi-
zens who did not acquire the right even when there were no externalities and
they were offered bribes. This result shows officials’ conformity to norms
even when it was inefficient to do so (providing the benefit added $40 to the
game) and implied choosing against their material self-interest (by rejecting
a bribe) and not reciprocating bribe offers. Such compliance with norms
regardless of costs to the self and others may suggest a rule-based “mind-
less” process, akin to a normative heuristic (Baron, 1994; Rand et al., 2014;
Sunstein, 2005). The effect of explicit norms on behavior could nonetheless
be linked to a consequentialist interpretation, namely, a condition of greater
accountability. Arguably, introducing an explicit normative demand may
limit the expression of ethical blindness (Sezer et al., 2015) and self-serving
biases (Ariely, 2012). In other words, presented with an explicit standard, a
person cannot argue ignorance to justify her departure from the norm.
In any case, before taking the normative effect found at first hand, it is
relevant to discuss the extent to which it could be explained as an Experimenter
Demand Effect (EDE; Zizzo, 2010) rather than to participants’ disposition to
follow prescriptive norms. An EDE entails assuming that the explicit norms
used in some of the conditions in the present protocol served to set partici-
pants’ beliefs about the experimenters’ expectations regarding their behavior
in the game (Zizzo, 2010). Then, decisions could be causally connected to
these beliefs, assuming a preference to comply with the experimenters’
expectations. We believe that this possibility does not compromise the con-
clusions derived from this study for several reasons.
Senci et al. 19

To begin with, we took methodological precautions to exert no demand

on participants. Participants were volunteers who had been invited by email
and had no prior relationship with the experimenters. In the oral instructions
before the game, participants were told that there were no correct or incorrect
decisions, and that we simply wanted to know their true preferences through
their decisions in the experiment. We emphasized that decisions were com-
pletely anonymous, and that we never use deception in our experiments.
Participants were truthfully told that neither peers nor researchers could
associate any decision with the real identity of the decision maker. In prac-
tice, participants sat in visually isolated cubicles and were randomly assigned
a number, which was their only identification through which they would later
be called to receive their earnings from their decisions in the experiment.
Moreover and as mentioned before, the incentives at stake were above
opportunity costs, particularly for university students, thus making them uni-
vocally salient. Last but not least, the written instruction not only presented
the explicit norms (rights and duties) but also the explicit statement that par-
ticipants were free to not comply with the given norms (this is a strategy
suggested to reduce EDEs; see Zizzo, 2010). All in all, we intended to create
an atmosphere of no demand, no deception, and anonymity.
Second and most important, even if we could not completely rule out an
EDE in the present experiment (as if often the case; see Zizzo, 2010), such
an effect may not be as problematic as one may initially think. Other research-
ers have deliberately used the experimenter’s demand as a tool to implement
normative pressure on participants to assess whether they are disposed to
follow norms (Cadsby et al., 2006; Capraro and Rand, 2018; Karakostas and
Zizzo, 2016 argue in the same vein). This has been done on the basis that
participants may take experimenters as authorities in the context of the lab
(Milgram, 1963). Zizzo (2010) argues that an EDE may enhance the external
validity of the study when such an effect helps reproduce a key feature of the
context of interest (Alekseev et al., 2017, present a similar argument in favor
of using loaded frames in experimental games). We believe this could be the
case in this study. There is a parallelism between the present laboratory con-
text and a real context involving the activities of public officials. The EDE
would enhance the external validity of the experiment assuming participants
took the experimenter as an authority and were thus sensitive to their beliefs
about the authority’s expectations for compliance with the mentioned norms.
A similar situation may involve the activities of real public officials and
whoever interacts with them (e.g. common citizens). Typically, public offi-
cials have authorities to whom they respond to, and it is reasonable to expect
that such authorities require officials to guide their decisions by relevant
20 Rationality and Society 00(0)

norms of the realm in consideration. Similarly, citizens who attend to a pub-

lic office typically know there are rules to be followed.

Synergies between sensitivity to externalities and explicit

prescriptive norms
The two compliance mechanisms mentioned so far, namely, weighing con-
sequences and following normative rules, may indeed present synergies.
This can be seen in the fact that the lowest level of bribe offers and benefit
provisions occurred in the NoRight_Externality condition. Information
about norms and externalities converged to deter bribery in this condition.
The fact that sensitivity to externalities was increased with the presence of
normative information shows some parallel with results from Barr and Serra
(2009). These authors tested an abstract versus a loaded frame in a one-shot
collusive BG and found that bribery was less frequent in the latter than the
former condition, though only for participants in the role of citizens (not for
officials) and when externalities were high. Taking Barr and Serra’s (2009)
study and ours together, one could see the effect of increasing the normative
information provided, from an abstract game, through a game framed with
words related to bribery, to a game with explicit information about norma-
tive status and duties: more normative information led to less bribery.
Indeed, this normative interpretation is consistent with the asymmetric
effect of normative information as a function of participants’ roles found in
the present experiment. Whereas citizens were only deterred from offering
bribes when normative information converged with the existence of exter-
nalities, for officials, normative information deterred the provision of
underserved benefits even in the absence of externalities. This asymmetry
between roles could be linked to the fact that normative information directly
prescribed actions for officials (“your duty is to …”), whereas the content of
the norm was relatively mute in terms of whether citizens should or should
not offer bribes. This suggests that norms directly prescribing behavior may
have a higher chance of affecting decisions.
We would like to highlight that these results show interesting connec-
tions with the experimental literature on lying. Indeed, in line with our
results, several papers have shown that a fraction of people seem to be
inflexible in their truth-telling behavior, as if they were following a deonto-
logical rule. For instance, it has been found that people tell the truth irre-
spective of consequences, even when telling a lie would be a Pareto
improvement (Biziou-van-Pol et al., 2015; Cappelen et al., 2013; Erat and
Gneezy, 2012). This echoes our results concerning the officials, since a
majority of participants in this role refrained from transgressing their duty
Senci et al. 21

even in conditions without externalities, in which everybody would have

been better off had they positively reciprocated bribe offers. At the same
time, the literature on lying also shows that the gains that accrue from lying
may be gauged against the loss inflicted on others, meaning that the conse-
quences of the lie matter to those making the decisions (Gneezy, 2005).
Therefore, the literature on lying is consistent with our double criterion
view. Although we did not implement different levels of externalities in the
present experiment, we can assert that participants took into account how
much others would lose since they offered or accepted bribes less frequently
in conditions with than without negative externalities.
Altogether, present results point toward a behavioral insight to apply in
the context of corruption deterrence, namely, elaborating strategies that
highlight both prescriptive actions and negative externalities caused by the
transgression of norms. Normative information, through a heuristic-like
and/or accountability-mediated process, may lead people toward socially
desirable options while precluding counter-normative alternatives to come
to mind (Hlobil, 2015).

Implication for the literature on laboratory bribery experiments

Regarding the influence of normative information on corruption, we believe
that the present protocol and results introduce a new effective dimension to
the experimental literature on bribery. In most bribery experiments,
researchers do not give participants explicit information on rights and duties
associated to participants’ roles. At most, authors have relied on loaded
frames, sanctions, and/or the presence of externalities to implicitly signal a
normative context (Abbink et al., 2002; Barr et al., 2009; Barr and Serra,
2009; Cameron et al., 2009). We actually had a control condition that resem-
bled some protocols in the literature (i.e. the NoNorm_Externality condi-
tion) in which a loaded frame was used and the provision of the benefit by
the official caused a negative externality. The aim of the externality is to
represent a situation in which the provision of the benefit is not rightfully
granted. Note, however, that participants in the NoNorm_Externality condi-
tion behaved differently from participants in the NoRight_Externality con-
dition, which explicitly represented the case where citizens did not acquire
the right to the benefit. More specifically, citizens tended to offer more
bribes and officials tended to grant more benefits when there was no explicit
normative information (i.e. in the NoNorm_Externality condition relative to
the NoRight_Externality condition). This result suggests that the mere pres-
ence of externalities associated with a decision option does not unequivo-
cally represent an unrightful option to participants, even in a framed
22 Rationality and Society 00(0)

scenario, as we discussed in section “Experimental studies of bribery and

relevant social norms.” In brief, we ask for caution when deriving conclu-
sions from BGs without explicit information on rights and duties because
results from such protocols may not generalize to situations with more nor-
mative content.
Last but not least, to our knowledge, the present protocol is the first to
show a clear effect of prescriptive norms on both citizens’ and officials’
bribery decisions in an experimental game. As mentioned before, Barr
and Serra (2009) found that a loaded frame reduced bribe offers, but not
bribe acceptances, and only when negative externalities were high. In
turn, D’Adda et al. (2016) reported a failure to find an effect of the esti-
mation of prescriptive norms on decisions in a series of collusive BGs.
Despite Barr and Serra (2009) and D’Adda et al. (2016) relied on loaded
wording to describe their game, it is possible that different participants
interpreted differently whether the citizen’s benefit was rightful, given
that the citizen’s normative status was not explicitly provided in their
studies. Getting rid of this ambiguity in the present protocol could explain
why prescriptive norms did affect decisions more strongly in the experi-
ment reported here.
Before we finish, we want to mention two natural venues to continue this
line of research on norms and corruption. First, whereas we here showed an
effect of prescriptive norms on economic decisions in the context of a col-
lusive type of bribery, it would be interesting to test whether the same effect
holds in the context of harassment bribery (in which the official can coerce
the citizen into corruption; Abbink et al., 2014). Banerjee (2016) pioneered
on this by doing a harassment BG with variations in (abstract vs loaded)
frames and entailments and showed the former to have no effect, whereas
the latter indeed generated strong norms that affected decisions. Second, in
the present experiment, we left out some factors that may be relevant in
shaping decisions in real-world bribery situations and could even interact
with the effect of normative information, such as, for example, the possibil-
ity of receiving material sanctions after norm transgressions or of commu-
nication between the parties involved. To introduce these factors in a
procedure similar to the one presented here would allow checking for the
robustness of present results, and increasing the external validity of the
experimental situation.
All in all, the present contribution to the experimental bribery litera-
ture can be summarized in the following three points: (1) the mere pres-
ence of negative externalities may not be enough to trigger full normative
expectations; (2) nonetheless, reminders of the negative externalities
associated with corruption may deter people from it; and (3) explicit nor-
mative information may present synergies with information about nega-
tive externalities in inhibiting bribery. These conclusions could be taken
Senci et al. 23

as preliminary behavioral insights in the elaboration of anti-corruption

policies.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Urs Fischbacher, Irenaeus Wolff, Katrin Schmelz,
and David Hugh-Jones for useful comments on oral presentations of this study.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the
Argentine Council of Science and Technology (Spanish acronym: CONICET; Grant
number PIP 2014–2016 No. 112-20130100600-CO) and the Argentine Agency of
Science and Technology Promotion (Grant code: PICT 2013-1582).

Notes
1. Hereafter “$” refers to Argentine pesos. The conversion rate at the time of the
experiment was US$1≈$15.
2. Given our main interest in collusive bribes, the reader may wonder about the
reasons behind our design. More precisely, the reader may ask why we didn’t
use an asymmetrical design. More specifically, if the citizen earned the benefit,
he or she could have directly received it, finishing the game, while keeping the
opportunity to offer a bribe to citizens who didn’t earn the benefit. The answer
is as follows: had we done that, we would have missed the effect of norma-
tive status (i.e. whether the citizen deserves the benefit) on bribery decisions,
which was one of the main goals of the study. Still, one may wonder about the
situation of those participants in the role of citizens who earned the right to the
benefit and had to decide whether to offer a bribe to the Official. They should
try to guess whether the Official would just follow the norm or would not do
it unless he or she obtains some surplus (bribe). In behavioral economics con-
texts, this is a very typical situation, as participants in certain role have to try to
guess what the other player would do in order to make a decision (e.g. player
1 in the Ultimatum Game must try to guess how the player 2 would respond to
different offers). As for the external validity, this situation may seem unusual,
but it is quite common in corruption-prone countries, where citizens or firms
sometimes have to find out whether bribing a public official is actually neces-
sary to get some benefit they deserve. In fact, this particular situation corre-
sponds to a specific type of bribery situation called “passive extortion” (Hasrun
et al., 2015), which has not been studied in the experimental literature. In future
research, we plan to incorporate multiple rounds or communication, in order to
investigate behavior in this type of situation more thoroughly.
3. Participants’ mean (±1 SD) earning in the experiment was $70 ± 13. The mini-
mum and maximum payoffs in the experiment were $50 and $90, respectively.
These earnings were obtained for participating in a session that lasted 90 min-
utes. Argentine minimal wage for 60 minutes of work was $30 at the time of
the experiment (i.e. $45 for 90 minutes; from http://www.economia.gob.ar/
24 Rationality and Society 00(0)

secretarias/politica-economica/programacion-macroeconomica/). Therefore,
participants’ earnings in the present experiment were above the opportunity
cost represented by the minimum wage.

ORCID iD
Rodrigo Moro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6828-9950

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