In a recent Nature Human Behavior paper, Professor Joe Henrich, along with colleagues Michael Muthukrishna (Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics), Patrick Francois, and Shayan Pourahmadi, incorporated the possibility of bribery into an institutional punishment public goods game in order to experimentally model corruption in the lab (Muthukrishna et al., 2017). The researchers examined the effects of anti-corruption strategies, cultural background, and structural factors (such as the strength of a leader) on corrupt behavior. The results show that the introduction of bribery reduces contributions to the public good. Further, the authors found that anti-corruption strategies can effectively increase contributions when a leader has substantial punitive power and economic potential is good; but otherwise, these strategies may in fact worsen contributions. This work was recently featured in a Human Nature Behavior News & Views (Milinski, 2017).
August 22, 2017