Di Zheng, J., Schram, A. and Doğan, G. (2021). Friend or foe? Social ties in bribery and corruption Experimental Economics, 24(3):854–882.

This paper studies how social ties interact with bribery and corruption. In the laboratory, subjects are in triads where two {\textquoteleft}performers{\textquoteright} individually complete an objective real-effort task and an evaluator designates one of them as the winner of a monetary prize. In one treatment dimension, we vary whether performers can bribe the evaluator—where any bribe made is non-refundable, irrespective of the evaluator{\textquoteright}s decision. A second treatment dimension varies the induced social ties between the evaluator and the performers. The experimental evidence suggests that both bribes and social ties may corrupt evaluators{\textquoteright} decisions. Bribes decrease the importance of performance in the decision. The effect of social ties is asymmetric. While performers{\textquoteright} bribes vary only little with their ties to the evaluator, evaluators exhibit favoritism based on social ties when bribes are not possible. This {\textquoteleft}social-tie-based{\textquoteright} corruption is, however, replaced by bribe-based corruption when bribes are possible. We argue that these results have concrete consequences for possible anti-corruption policies.