The Potential of Non-Monetary Interventions to Mitigate Corruption : Experimental Evidence from India

This paper combines a game, a vignette of the misappropriation of citizens’ funds, and a survey to inform an experiment on corruption in India. We assess three nonmonetary interventions’ efficacy in decreasing a player’s propensity to approve a second party’s attempt to misappropriate a third party’s money, in exchange for a possible bribe. We find that the prospect of disapproval by the third party cannot deter the first party from accepting corrupt proposals. The intervention, making the first player face incentivized public opinion about disapproval’s ability to raise rejections, backfires as it increases misappropriation, a large share of which is offered as a preemptive bribe, possibly to offset the first party’s disutility from an adverse public view. The final intervention that frames the player roles with the vignette’s help outperforms the rest by leading to an increase in the rejection of proposals offering lucrative material rewards for acting unethically. We further discover that females misappropriate, bribe, and accept a bribe significantly less than their male counterparts