🧠What This Paper Asks
Citizens often enable corruption by paying bribes, yet even in highly corrupt settings only a minority always pay. This study asks why individuals choose to bribe in some situations but not others by combining insights from two major literatures on corruption.
🧠Theoretical Approach
Integrating principal-agent and collective-action perspectives clarifies how three broad factors shape selective bribery:
- motivations (e.g., expected personal benefit),
- costs (e.g., monetary and time expenses), and
- risks (e.g., detection and sanctions).
This analytical framework explains when and why citizens are more or less willing to engage in corrupt payments.
🧪 How This Was Tested
A pre-registered conjoint experiment conducted in Ukraine in 2020 evaluates the framework’s predictions. The design varied attributes relevant to the decision to pay a bribe and measured respondents’ stated willingness to engage in corruption across scenarios.
🔬 Key Findings
- Few people report always paying bribes, even where corruption is endemic.
- Experimental results predominantly corroborate the pre-registered predictions: citizens’ motivations, perceived costs, and perceived risks systematically affect willingness to bribe.
- The framework helps identify specific situational features that increase or dampen citizens’ readiness to pay bribes.
đź’ˇ Why It Matters
Understanding selective bribery points to targeted institutional reforms that could reduce citizens’ incentives to pay and help break self-reinforcing cycles of corruption. The findings offer actionable guidance for policies aimed at altering the costs, risks, or perceived benefits that drive corrupt exchanges.
