Institutions, Normative Expectations, and Harassment Bribery: Evidence from a Three-country Experiment

2026.

Zhuravleva T., Afanasev K., Engelmann J., Morone A.

Extortionary ("harassment") bribery can persist even when widely condemned, consistent with a coordination problem sustained by beliefs about what others do and what others consider acceptable. We study whether a minimal institutional featurethe presence of a third-party monitor empowered to punish-shifts (i) normative expectations about extortion and compliance and (ii) empirical expectations about their prevalence. We implement a preregistered laboratory experiment with two phases in the Netherlands, Italy, and Russia. In Phase I, participants play a harassment bribery game with or without monitoring. In Phase II, using an independent sample we elicit social appropriateness judgments using a Krupka-Weber coordination game and empirical expectations about Phase I behaviour. We report preregistered within-country comparisons and complementary exploratory pooled specifications that increase precision while allowing country-heterogeneous effects. Overall, the findings are consistent with monitoring operating not only through deterrence but also as an institutional signal that can reshape the belief environment sustaining harassment bribery, with heterogeneous responses across settings.

Keywords: monitoring, social norms, coordination, third-party punishment, Harassment bribery, cross-country experiments