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Corruption: A cross-country comparison of contagion and conformism
For successful anti-corruption policies, it is crucial to understand the basic social contract governing the interaction between people. Social norms are a key element of the social contract, but may vary across cultures. We investigate how descriptive social norms af- fect the development of corruption over time. In a laboratory experiment implemented in the Netherlands, Russia, Italy, and China we study a corruption game that is based on a real-effort t ask. To induce natural variation in descriptive norms, we vary the type of infor- mation about others’ choices. Such information may lead to ‘contagion’ -where corruption increases in response to observing high corruption by others- or ‘conformism’ -where it decreases when low corruption by others is observed. Our results show evidence of con- tagion.