Schram, A., Zheng, J. and Zhuravleva, T. (2022). Corruption: A cross-country comparison of contagion and conformism Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 193:497--518.

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 affect 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 task. To induce natural variation in descriptive norms, we vary the type of information about others{\textquoteright} choices. Such information may lead to {\textquoteleft}contagion{\textquoteright} -where corruption increases in response to observing high corruption by others- or {\textquoteleft}conformism{\textquoteright} -where it decreases when low corruption by others is observed. Our results show evidence of contagion.