Reward Self-Reporting to Deter Corruption: An Experiment on Mitigating Collusive Bribery

This paper investigates the effectiveness of offering rewards for self reports as a means of combating collusive bribery. Rewarding self reporting theoretically sows distrust between parties tempted to exchange bribes and may reduce bribery even where authorities are otherwise ineffective in uncovering corruption. Our results indicate that offering rewards is weakly effective in reducing collusive bribery where parties expect to engage with one another in future and is a potent deterrent when parties do not expect to encounter one another again. Rewarding self reporting is thus likely to be highly effective in reducing bribery in the field but only for one off interactions.