IS MORE COMPETITION ALWAYS BETTER? AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF EXTORTIONARY CORRUPTION Academic Article

abstract

• Using a laboratory experiment, we assess whether increasing competition among public officials reduces extortionary corruption. We find that increasing the number of providers has no effect on bribe demands when citizens' search costs are high, but it increases corruption when search costs are low. The effect is absent in a parallel setting framed as a standard market, which we attribute to citizens using a nonsequential search strategy as opposed to sequential search in the corruption setting. We conclude that efforts to reduce search costs, such as infrastructure investments, are preferable to anticorruption policies aimed at increasing the number of providers. (JEL D73, D49, C91)

authors

• Serra, Danila

published proceedings

• Economic Inquiry

altmetric score

• 0.5

author list (cited authors)

• Ryvkin, D., & Serra, D.

citation count

• 5

complete list of authors

• Ryvkin, Dmitry||Serra, Danila

publication date

• January 2019

publisher

• Wiley  Publisher

published in

• ECONOMIC INQUIRY  Journal

keywords

• 16 Peace, Justice And Strong Institutions
• 38 Economics
• 3801 Applied Economics

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1111/ecin.12703

start page

• 50

end page

• 72

volume

• 57

issue

• 1

URL

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ecin.12703