Politicians and Their Promises in an Uncertain World: Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment in India

Prasenjit Banerjee, Vegard Iversen, Sandip Mitra, Antonio Nicolo' and Kunal Sen

Economics Discussion Paper Series from Economics, The University of Manchester

Abstract: In emerging economies, policy implementation failures may be caused by bureaucratic inefficiency, strategic conduct by elected or non-elected office holders or by other hurdles. For local citizens, uncertainty about the true cause of a failure prevails. We examine the effect of a promise as a mechanism to mitigate implementation failures in a laboratory experiment with local politician participants. In our modified dictator game, nature intervenes with positive probability and randomly allocates the endowment to the dictator or recipient. A core feature of our design is that a recipient who receives zero does not know whether nature intervened or not: a dictator’s selfish allocation can therefore be hidden. We compare two treatments, (1) baseline: dictators choose how much to give when they, and not nature, decide the outcome; (2) promise: dictators make a non-binding promise to the recipient prior to deciding how much to give. In the baseline, about one third of politicians distribute zero; in the promise treatment, 88% of politicians promise to give a positive amount and 83% keep their promise. Giving is significantly more generous and the fraction of zero-giving significantly lower in the promise treatment. These results support our simple theoretical model which predicts that a promise affects the behaviour of politicians who care about their image and who incur a psychological cost from not keeping their word.

JEL-codes: D64 H11 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Working Paper: Politicians and their promises in an uncertain world: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:man:sespap:1806

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