Bribery across nations

Abstract Bribery, a grand global challenge, often occurs across national jurisdictions. Behavioral research studying bribery to inform anti-corruption interventions, however, has merely examined bribery within single nations. Here, we report online experiments and provide first insights into cross-national bribery. We ran a pilot study (across three nations), and a large, incentivized experiment using a bribery game played across 18 nations ( N = 6,472, total number of incentivized decisions = 401,904). Results show that people offer disproportionally more bribes to interaction partners from nations with a high (vs. low) reputation for foreign bribery, measured by macro-level indicators of corruption perceptions. People widely share nation-specific expectations about a nation's bribery acceptance levels. However, these nation-specific expectations negatively correlate with actual bribe acceptance levels, suggesting shared yet inaccurate stereotypes about bribery tendencies. Moreover, the interaction partner’s national background (more than one’s own national background) drives people’s decision to offer or accept a bribe – a finding we label conditional bribery.