Distance to news: how social media information affects bribe-giving in India

Jun Goto (), Takashi Kurosaki () and Yuko Mori ()
Additional contact information
Jun Goto: Kobe University
Takashi Kurosaki: Hitotsubashi University
Yuko Mori: Tsuda University

The Japanese Economic Review, 2022, vol. 73, issue 1, No 9, 179-209

Abstract: Abstract While recent empirical evidence reveals some effective interventions in preventing corruption among bureaucrats and politicians, there has been little discussion on how to prevent the bribe-giving behavior of ordinary citizens. This paper investigates the role of social media information in influencing the supply of bribes by citizens instead of the demand side. We, therefore, developed and published an original news application in India and implemented a 3-month experiment. In this application, we randomly circulate live news related to corruption to users and incorporate a lab experiment into the app system to elicit users’ bribery behavior every week. We find that corruption news involving politicians within a close geographical proximity lowers users’ moral costs against the anti-social bribery act, leading to an increase in the amount of bribes. However, news of accused citizens and officials within the geographic proximity increases their moral cost against bribes and decreases the amount. This suggests that individually tailored local information on corruption may be an effective tool to reduce citizens’ supply of bribes.

Keywords: Local news; Bribe; Social media; Mobile application (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s42973-021-00084-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jecrev:v:73:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s42973-021-00084-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/42973

DOI: 10.1007/s42973-021-00084-w

Access Statistics for this article

The Japanese Economic Review is currently edited by Michihiro Kandori

More articles in The Japanese Economic Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().