Economic theory predicts that dishonesty thrives in secrecy. Yet, team-based decisions are ubiquitous in public policy-making. How does teamwork influence the tendency for selfdealings when public servants – both honest and corrupt – must work together to make decisions under the veil of within-group secrecy? This paper designs a field experiment guided by a theoretical model of team-level dishonesty, where we define and unpack the drivers of the dishonesty concessions that individuals make in a team-setting as a cooperative bargain between team players.
The experiment is implemented in a sample of village council (Gram Panchayat) members in the State of West Bengal in India, extending the die roll experiment à la Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013). By bringing together evidence pointing to the distinctive contributions of peer dishonesty influence, social image concerns (e.g as a gender- and seniority-based marker), and power asymmetry effects (e.g. between politicians in reserved and openly contested seats) in guiding the dishonesty concessions individuals choose to make in a team, our findings shed light on the salience and nuanced role of committee composition in teams of public officials.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.