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Titel des Experiments
Deleterious effect of corruption indices on interregional trust

Autoren
Chapkovski, Philipp

Kurzbeschreibung des Experiments
The aim of this paper is to study how the information about the corruption level of a region may affect expectations regarding the honesty and trustworthiness of the inhabitants of this region. Corruption Perception indices such as TI CPI are commonly used to measure perceived corruption at the country level. They provide important insights for investors and policy makers about the quality of governance and potential risks of investment to the area. However, these indices may produce unexpected effects. We hypothesise that it can result in undermining trust and making inhabitants of more ‘corrupt’ areas look less honest and trustworthy.
In order to measure this effect we use the fact that modern crowdsourcing platforms allow us to recruit people from different regions. Furthermore, we want to control the country effect, so we use a regional level corruption index within one country: Russia. We use Russia for several reasons: (1) there is a crowdsourcing platform Toloka that allows easy recruiting of participants from different regions; (2) the corruption is generally perceived as a wide-spread problem in Russia; and (3) there is a relatively high degree of interregional variation of perceived corruption level.
Participants play two games: a ‘cheating’ game where they have to flip a coin, and if they report a 'head' they get an additional bonus. After flipping a coin participants make incentivized guesses about how many participants from each of three regions in study will report a 'head'. This expected share is used as an implicit measure of honesty of an average person from this region. The second game is a standard trust game (Berg 1995) in a strategy method format, where the first movers take decisions on how much to send to each potential second mover in each of three regions.
The study consists of three treatments that vary the amount of information provided to a participant before they make a decision as first movers in a trust game and while guessing the honesty of others in a ‘cheating’ game. In the ‘Fixed Information - Neutral’ three neutral statistics are reported about each region. In the ‘Fixed information - Corruption’ in addition to these three statistics they are also provided with the index of corruption for each region. In the ‘Endogenous information’ people can choose what kind of information they would like to receive about each region before making the decision.
Participants will be recruited via the crowdsourcing platform Toloka.ai from three Russian regions (Moscow, Voronezh oblast, and Arkhangelsk oblast), older than 18 years old, and with a self-reported fluent knowledge of Russian language. First movers will be recruited from Moscow only. We will exclude participants who fail to provide correct answers to the comprehension quiz for the ‘Cheating Game’ comprehension quiz or ‘Trust game’ comprehension for more than 4 times.

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