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Featured in: Organization Science’s The Wellspring initiative, as breakthrough piece of organisational research in the three areas of Ethics and Misconduct, Compensation and Incentives, and Emerging Markets

Listen: “Diagnosing and Treating Bribery in Public Organizations,” Delve Interview, Season 4, Ep. 20, Thursday, April 11, 2024.

Significance Reduced bribery by 22 percentage points (by 75%) in Moroccan maternity wards that were harder hit with bribery. First to address workplace bribery using a behavioural intervention inside real-world public sector organisation, and in particular, one premised on reputation management between coworker groups. Charted a new solutions space based on social incentives to prevent corruption in organisations. Main Methodology Randomised controlled trial in Moroccan public hospitals, complemented by in-depth fieldwork.

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Invited Chapter | Best Graduate Student Paper Award, Rationality & Society, American Sociological Association (early version)

Significance Demonstrates how bribery occurs despite widespread disapproval of the practice. Bribe solicitors selectively target potential bribe givers and strategically adapt the way they ask for bribes based on their targets’ socioeconomic status and other social signifiers. This explains low conflict and reporting rates, undermining formal institutions’ efforts to combat corruption. Bribery scales and sticks, not because citizens condone it, but because they are emotionally managed. This means anticorruption interventions are best focused on addressing demand-side motivation for taking bribes. Main Methodology Survey data on bribe exchanges between health workers and patients in Moroccan healthcare.

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Read Delve Coverage: Bribery isn’t just about money – it’s about organizational design

Significance Demonstrates that bad combinations of work task allocations and wage inequality between coworkers in government health facilities can increase health workers’ susceptibility to taking bribes from patients by up to 20%. This means that government facilities can address bribery by reallocating work, making local relative pay adjustments, or combining both. First study to locate causes of corruption in structural features of organisational design. Main Methodology Conjoint survey experiment with over 2,200 Indian health workers, complemented by qualitative research.

Significance Demonstrates that bribery’s social acceptance in government organisations is overstated in high prevalence settings, irrespective of bribery’s social organisation. This paper reveals that social incentives constrain bribery’s disclosure and spread, contradicting sociocultural and collective action theories of corruption. Three features of public sector labour markets make social incentives critical for government workers’ job and career outcomes: ambiguous performance measurement, politically intertwined bureaucracies, and heterogeneous staffing. By situating officials in their organisations and the broader public sector ecosystem, this paper reorients anticorruption strategy towards targeted interventions leveraging social incentives and organisational design. Main Methodology Theory development, synthesis of diverse field evidence case including case studies and descriptive survey data, and analytical review.