Revisiting kin and ethnic favoritism in the bribery experiment

Mahsa Akbari, Duman Bahrami-Rad and Erik Kimbrough

Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 256, issue C

Abstract: We report a conceptual replication of Akbari et al. (2020), who study the impact of co-ethnicity and kinship on behavior in an experimental “bribery game”. In the game, player A can offer a bribe to B, who can help A by inefficiently transferring resources from passive third-party C. We replicate the finding that by varying the relatedness of A, B and C, we can substantially modulate the willingness of A to offer the bribe and the willingness of B to reciprocate the bribe by harming C. The findings are consistent with theories of kin altruism and ethnic favoritism.

Keywords: Lab experiment; Corruption; Bribery; Kinship; Favoritism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 D73 D9 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176525004069
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolet:v:256:y:2025:i:c:s0165176525004069

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112569

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().