Distance to news: how social media information affects bribe-giving in India

While recent empirical evidence reveals some effective interventions in preventing corruption among bureaucrats and politicians, there has been little discussion on how to prevent the bribe-giving behavior of ordinary citizens. This paper investigates the role of social media information in influencing the supply of bribes by citizens instead of the demand side. We, therefore, developed and published an original news application in India and implemented a 3-month experiment. In this application, we randomly circulate live news related to corruption to users and incorporate a lab experiment into the app system to elicit users’ bribery behavior every week. We find that corruption news involving politicians within a close geographical proximity lowers users’ moral costs against the anti-social bribery act, leading to an increase in the amount of bribes. However, news of accused citizens and officials within the geographic proximity increases their moral cost against bribes and decreases the amount. This suggests that individually tailored local information on corruption may be an effective tool to reduce citizens’ supply of bribes.