Los experimentos económicos de laboratorio como estrategia para el estudio de la corrupción

Corruption is a problem that institutions all over the world experience to a greater or lesser degree. The issue is particularly severe in Latin America and, especially, in Mexico where it mixes with the violence exerted by drug cartels. Given its social costs, it is vital to acquire knowledge about the determinants of corruption and the behavioral factors underlying people´s corruptibility to combat it effectively. Complementing traditional approaches to the study corruption, such as perception surveys and the study of criminal cases, economic experiments in the laboratory emerged as a methodological option to obtain data about the behavioral determinants of people´s corruptibility. In this article, I present an introduction to this field of study associated with experimental and behavioral economics. I focus on experimental studies of bribery, and discuss their main advantages and limitations. Within the positive aspects, I highlight the use of experiments as preliminary means to study the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies such as, for example, the benefits of personnel rotation to destabilize the establishment of trust in relationships prone to corruption. Within the limitations, I discuss the issue of the extent to which experimental results can be generalized to other contexts