Bringing good and bad Whistle-blowers to the Lab

Jan Theodor Schikora

Discussion Papers in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: Whistle-blowing is seen as a powerful tool in containing corruption, although theoretical findings and experimental evidence cast doubt on its effectiveness. We expand a standard corruption model by allowing both, briber and official to initiate corruption actively, in order to assess the full effect of whistle-blowing. In our laboratory experiment we find that the effect of symmetrically punished whistle-blowing is ambiguous since it reduces the impact of corruption on productive activity, but also increases its stability. We show that asymmetric leniency for the official offsets the negative effect. The results can be explained by simple arguments about belief structures within the self-interested model of payoff maximizing.

Keywords: Corruption; Experiments; Whistle-blowing; Punishment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 D73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lmu:muenec:12161

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