Professional identity is deemed to be a key determinant of economic behaviour: the way an agent defines herself shapes her decisions. This paper explores the effect of professional identity reminders on corrupt behaviour. In a newly designed lab-in-the field experiment, 527 public servants from Burundi were asked to allocate rationed vouchers between anonymous citizens, some of whom tried to bribe them. Public servants who were randomly exposed to a sensitization message that stressed professional identity and values behaved in a fairer manner than those exposed to a standard anti-corruption message or no message. This suggests that the moral cost of bribery increases when an agent reflects upon her professional identity, thereby prompting her to more equitable service delivery. However, another side of corrupt behaviour, bribe-taking, did not change with the messages, which highlights the importance of considering different components in corruption. The experiment provides fresh insights into the design of anti-corruption strategies.

1. Professional Identity, Bribery and Public Service Delivery:
Evidence from a lab-in-the-field Experiment in Burundi
Jean-Benoit Falisse
Centre of African Studies, Edinburgh University
Nastassia Leszczynska
SBS-EM, ECARES, Université libre de Bruxelles and FNRS
May 2017
ECARES working paper 2015-07
ECARES
ULB - CP 114/04
50, F.D. Roosevelt Ave., B-1050 Brussels BELGIUM
www.ecares.org

2. 2
Professional identity, bribery and public service
A lab-in-the-field experiment in Burundi1
Jean-Benoît Falisse2 Nastassia Leszczynska3
4 May 2017
Abstract
Professional identity is deemed to be a key determinant of
economic behaviour: the way an agent defines herself shapes
her decisions. This paper explores the effect of professional
identity reminders on corrupt behaviour. In a newly designed
lab-in-the-field experiment, 527 public servants from Burundi
were asked to allocate rationed vouchers between anonymous
citizens, some of whom tried to bribe them. Public servants who
were randomly exposed to a sensitization message that stressed
professional identity and values behaved in a fairer manner
than those exposed to a standard anti-corruption message or no
message. This suggests that the moral cost of bribery increases
when an agent reflects upon her professional identity, thereby
prompting her to more equitable service delivery. However,
another side of corrupt behaviour, bribe-taking, did not change
with the messages, which highlights the importance of
considering different components in corruption. The
experiment provides fresh insights into the design of anti-
corruption strategies.
JEL keywords: C91, D73, H40, O12, H83
Keywords: identity, corruption, public service delivery, public servants, Burundi
In the last decades, a growing body of literature has been concerned with the monetary
and non-monetary incentives behind corrupt actions (RoseAckerman 1975; Shleifer and
Vishny 1993; Drugov 2010). However, few researchers have explored the relationship
between identity and corruption, and when they have, their focus has been on culture,
defined as shared values and beliefs among social groups (Banuri and Eckel 2012). The
present research takes a different perspective and investigates the role of professional self-
identity, which is how a person perceives him/herself (Baumeister 1999a) as a professional,
when facing bribery. The paper explores the idea that relationship to identity is a crucial
determinant of how an agent will face corruption attempts. In addition to contributing to the
1 Favourable opinion of ULB Ethics committee regarding the experiment (ref 026/2013). This research was
generously funded by 11.11.11., a coalition of NGOs, unions, movements and solidarity groups in Flanders
(Belgium) and supported by the University of Burundi. We would like to thank Alix Nijimbere for his
invaluable support, as well as Michel and Divine, our lab assistants. Y. Nindorera, Y.-A. de Montjoye, A.
Nkurunziza, E. Ndayegamiye, and M. Jacobs provided us with precious help for designing the experiment.
Thanks are due to A. Estache, G. Kirchsteiger, P. Verwimp, O. D’Aoust, M. Kissine and R. Mulligan for
feedback on previous versions. Nastassia Leszczynska acknowledges financial support from the Fonds
National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS).
2 Centre of African Studies, Edinburgh University, jb.falisse@ed.ac.uk
3 SBS-EM, ECARES, Université libre de Bruxelles and FNRS, nleszczy@ulb.ac.be

3. 3
fields of identity and corruption economics, there is also a pragmatic interest in such a study
as it may give impetus to new and more efficient anti-corruption strategies.
This study looks at bribery in the context of a laboratory game that required actual
Burundian public servant participants to allocate vouchers representing access to a rationed
public service. The scenario seeks to understand not only when public servants engage in
bribery but also how a bribe offer affects their public service delivery. We find some evidence
that reminding public servants of their professional identity and the qualities expected from
it influences their delivery of the public service, i.e. vouchers allocation, but not their
propensity to accept bribes. Furthermore, the participants seem to separate the dimensions
of inequity and bribery-taking, which also correlate with different socio-demographic
variables.
The first section of this paper connects our research with the literature on the economics
of corruption, provides explanations for the use of identity reminders, and gives background
information on Burundi and its public service. The experimental design is explained in the
second section and the results are presented in the third section. A last section discusses the
potential mechanisms that underpin the results as well as their policy and research
implications.
1 Background
1.1 The Economics of Corruption and Identity
Corruption, which can be defined as the abuse of entrusted powers for private gain4, can
occur at different levels and take different forms (bribery, nepotism, regulatory capture, etc.).
Among them, the bribery of low-level public servants is certainly the most frequently
experienced by ordinary citizens, especially in low-income and fragile settings (Khan 1996;
Noonan 1988; Van Rijckeghem and Weder 2001). There exists a widespread consensus that
the practice of corruption generates negative externalities that jeopardize economic
development and damage social life.5 A large number of macro level surveys evidenced this
point (Lambsdor 1999; Mauro 1995; Treisman 2007) and could not be disproved by the few
empirical papers investigating the potential benefits of corruption (Aidt 2009).
The corruption phenomenon not only involves societal and institutional but also
individual dimensions (Guerrero and Rodriguez-Oreggia 2008). Personal and social
characteristics (e.g. age, experience, religion or gender) constitute the identity of an
individual, which are known to in uence behaviour related to corruption (Armantier and Boly
2013; Serra 2006; Swamy et al. 2001). The identity of an individual is always relative to the
group she belongs to, and the way she relates to it (Baumann and Gingrich 2004). In social
psychology, Tajfel 1978 defines the concept of social identity as the part of an individual’s
self-concept that derives from his knowledge of his belonging to a social group. One’s identity
is also a matter of self-definition, and this feature is captured by the concept of self-identity
defined by Baumeister 1999b as: the individual’s belief about himself or herself, including
the person’s attributes and who and what the self is. This relationship to identity is potentially
crucial for understanding when an individual engages in corrupt behaviour.
4 Transparency International, World Bank.
5 Corruption hampers economic growth (Mo 2001; Fisman and Svensson 2007), jeopardizes
social cohesion and welfare (Chan, To, and Chan 2006), and increases inequalities (Gyimah-
Brempong 2002).

4. 4
Measuring and understanding corruption is challenging. Since people rarely and
reluctantly share their experiences as bribers and bribees, surveys usually only gather
opinions on and estimations of corruption rather than first-hand experiences (Kaufmann,
Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2006). There is some evidence that this sort of perception data does
not affect the actual level of corruption correctly (Olken and Barron 2009). Micro-level
surveys combining direct and indirect observation of corruption constitute an improvement
in the measurement issue (Duggan and Levitt 2002; Olken 2009; Reinikka and Svensson
2004; Sequeira and Djankov 2010), but they are scarce and costly. They also tend to focus on
the briber and depend partly on potentially biased self-reporting bribes. Experiments,
including the lab-in-the-field approach of this paper, constitute an interesting alternative
approach to understanding corruption dynamics. They provide first-hand information on
individual corrupt behaviour (Abbink and Serra 2012; Treisman 2007; Barr and Serra
2009a). Experiments on corruption started about 15 years ago6, with Frank and Schulze
2000 designing a controlled field experiment where students faced the temptation of
receiving money for taking a decision against public interest. A few years later, Abbink 2002
designed laboratory bribery games that involved a public official and a firm in three
variations: pure reciprocity, negative externalities and possible penalty. The issue of service
delivery was only touched upon through the channel of negative externalities. Scholars have
since adapted the game to investigate other aspects of corrupt behaviour and test anti-
corruption strategies (Azfar and Nelson 2007; Jacquemet 2005).
1.2 Public service in Burundi
Most corruption experiments are conducted in laboratories with students who play non-
contextualised games or are instructed to act the part of public servants (Barr and Serra
2009a). As Serra and Wantchekon 2012 point out, a key methodological challenge is to find
ways to articulate the advantages of laboratory and field research in producing contributions
that can claim some level of external validity. These concerns are especially relevant in the
present study, which is primarily concerned with the identity of the participants and intends
to generate relevant insights for policy making. Hence our decision to organise a lab-in-the-
field, or ’extra-lab experiment (Charness, Gneezy, and Kuhn 2013), where the selected
participants are also the subjects of our study, i.e., public servants. The research is set in
Burundi, a fragile country where the delivery of public services and the corruption of public
servants are major problems and where there is an interest for new anti-corruption
strategies.
Burundi ranked 159 out of 175 in the 2014 Transparency International corruption
perception index. In 2011, 74% of the Burundians reported to have paid a bribe in the last 12
months (Corruption Perception Index 2012) and the International Crisis Group denounced
a worsening of the corruption crisis in 2012. Authority disruption and government failures
in the last decades as well as the 1993-2005 civil wars are believed to have fuelled corrupt
behaviours. Reports, such as the one published in 2007 by International Alert and GRADIS,
find feelings of restrained anger and resignation towards corruption in all regions of the
country. They highlight the dramatic consequences of petty corruption in political, economic,
and also social aspects of life in Burundi.
A series of anti-corruption initiatives have been taken in recent years; they include a
revision of the legal framework as well as stricter sanctions and measures to improve law
enforcement. These include the creation of an independent tax revenue authority and a
special anti-corruption police brigade (International Crisis Group, 2012). These measures
6 For an extensive review presenting recent advances in the study of corruption based on
experiments, see Serra and Wantchekon 2012.

5. 5
however have proven largely insufficient and corruption has been an important theme in the
2010 and 2015 electoral campaigns. The despondency of Bujumbura residents towards
rampant corruption reportedly contributed to fuelling the riots of 2015.
At US$600 ppp7 , Burundi’s GDP per capita is one of the lowest in the world and
agriculture is the main source of income and employment for 90% of the Burundian
population. The administrative system is largely inherited from Belgium, the former colonial
power, and has been influenced and reformed with and by international aid support over the
last decades. With few opportunities in the private sector, public service positions are highly
regarded and are seen as an easy way to climb the social ladder and become wealthier. A
recent survey conducted in Burundi on children professional aspirations finds that a majority
of respondents - 35% - aspire to work in the public sector in the future (Jeusette & Verwimp
2017). The capture of resources and the politicization of the Burundi public service are very
important and provide public servants with significant power and material advantages
(International Crisis Group, 2012).
The participants of the study were active public servants coming from health (clinics),
education (primary and secondary schools), justice (non-judge staff at civil and criminal
courts), and police sectors. These services having been qualified as central to the general
citizenry (The East African Bribery Index 2013) and relating differently to corruption.
According to the East African Bribery Index compiled by Transparency International (2013),
policemen score first both in terms of the likelihood to ask for a bribe and in the share of total
bribe they collect (24.7%, 52%). They are closely followed by the judiciary sector (21%,
27.8%), and the education sector (12.9%, 13.2%) with medical services appearing much less
corrupted (3.1%, 0.4%).
1.3 Conceptual Framework and Rationale
Donors and governments often use sensitization to improve the governance of ‘fragile’
states. If sensitization campaigns are a non-expensive tool to try influencing citizens’
behaviour, their effectiveness is far from being established. Adequate attention rarely goes to
the incentives and values the campaign aims at improving. In particular, sensitization
campaigns based on identity need to be tested as a non-expensive approach with a potential
impact on public service delivery. In economics, Akerlof and Kranton 2000 have stressed
that agents make economic decisions not only on the basis of rational incentives but also in
relation to their identity and self-image. They incorporate an identity component into the
classic utility function in such a way that utility increases when a person’s behaviour
corresponds to their ideal self. This is consistent with experiments in social psychology that
have shown that priming individuals on their identity influences ethical behaviour. Mazar,
Amir, and Ariely 2008 argue that people who take a bad action deploy unconscious strategies
to distance their self-identity from their unethical behaviour. People behaving unethically
will typically disconnect their actions from their identity, minimizing or denying harmful
actions. In the case of corruption, it could mean that the more blurred the negative
externalities, the easier the denial. In line with this idea, behavioural psychologists Bryan,
Adams, and Monin 2012 observed a decrease in cheating behaviour when asking the
participants of a game not to be cheaters, rather than simply asking them not to cheat. Even
though this experiment is not directly on corruption, it is an important insight that echoes
theoretical findings on the importance of one’s (perceived) identity in economic and social
behaviour (Schlenker 1982). In a recent study on bankers’ social norms in Switzerland, Cohn,
7 2012 GDP per capita Purchasing Power Parity, World Development indicators.

6. 6
Fehr, and Maréchal 2014 shed light on the power of professional self-identity, showing that
reminding bankers of their profession has a negative impact on their ethical behaviour.
In line with this literature, this article seeks to test whether such mechanism also plays
out in the case of corruption attempts: are individuals who are reminded of their professional
identity, in our case being a public servant, less likely to be corrupt?
2 Experimental Design
2.1 The game
The study sought to reproduce a situation of petty corruption with a scenario involving
a public servant, citizens, and the distribution of a basic public service (Barr and Serra
2009a). In our design, the public service was available in limited quantity only (rival good).
This rationing feature was crucial to test for equity in terms of service provision. It also
mimicked a real life situation, e.g. shortage of basic goods, limited availability of places in a
service (schools), or production limitations to issuing administrative documents. The game
was never presented to the participants as a bribery game: it was introduced as ‘a game about
the delivery of public services’. After all the sessions were finished, debriefing was done by
phone.
The main participants, all actual public servants, were assigned the role of ‘public
servant’ in the game. They were expected to deliver a public service (in the form of allocating
vouchers) to citizens. The citizens, recruited among the students of the University of the
Great Lakes in Bujumbura, played in a different game session. 8 The game followed a
structured sequence:
1. Preliminary stage: In a separate session, the ’citizens’ made requests for vouchers. They
were informed that (1) the official price for requesting one voucher was BIF 5009, (2)
vouchers could be exchanged (at the end of the game) against BIF 1,250, and (3) there
was a rationing situation which meant that civil servant might not be able to fulfil every
request. The citizens could choose to make ’normal’ requests for vouchers, sending the
public servant a BIF 500 request for one voucher, or ’special’ requests, sending the public
servant a BIF 1,000 request for one voucher. The requests, along with game money, were
then transferred to the public servants. The transfer was operated in such a way that each
public servant would receive an identical distribution of requests. The citizens are passive
players who are crucial for the credibility of the game: the public servants were informed
that real people would be affected by their decisions in the game.
2. Stage 1: The context was explained to the participants. Public servants were given the
task of managing the distribution of vouchers among citizens. It was clearly explained
that (i) it is a public service that is limited in quantity (e.g. in a rationing situation) and
that (ii) the public service is basic and equally deserved by each citizen. Public servants
were therefore expected to distribute the vouchers equally among citizens
8 The game played by the citizens is not the focus of the present article and will not be discussed
in length here, as our focus is on the identity of the bribee, i.e. the public servant.
9 $1 = BIF 1,600 at the time of the experiment

7. 7
3. Stage 2: Each public servant received an endowment of twelve vouchers. Public servants
were instructed to distribute these twelve vouchers among three citizens (vouchers can
be cashed by citizens only).
4. Stage 3: Each public servant received three seemingly similar envelopes from the
citizens; they contained anonymous written requests for vouchers as well as their
payment. One of the three envelopes contained a bribe. The bribe consisted of a special
request for more vouchers than what a citizen was entitled to receive as well as more
money than the vouchers normally cost. Each public servant received two normal
requests and one special request. Each public servant received:
 12 vouchers giving access to the public service. Each voucher costs BIF 500
to the citizen and can be cashed in against BIF 1,250 at the end of the game
by citizens only.
 3 envelopes containing citizen requests:
o 2 envelopes containing a request for 4 vouchers and BIF 2,000 in
game money.
o 1 envelope containing a ’special’ request for 6 vouchers and BIF
6,000 in game money.
5. Stage 4: Each public servant distributed their vouchers among the requests by putting
them into the corresponding envelope. In practice, public servants were free to keep
whatever amount of game money the citizens sent them; although the instructions
indicated that only the amount of game money corresponding to the cost of the vouchers
should be kept.
6. Stage 5: Each public servant exchanged game money against real money at the end of the
game.10
Two dimensions of corruption were studied and linked to the non-respect of two rules:
1. Bribery (price): the amount of money taken by the public servants that does not
correspond to the delivered voucher(s).
2. Equity in public service delivery (resource allocation): the number of vouchers
distributed by the public servant to each citizen.
People were thus given the opportunity to claim the money they were not entitled to at
the citizens’ expense. The briber had to decide whether and how much to offer as a bribe
without knowing whether the bribee would be willing to grant him the favour he asked for in
return and the bribee was free to reject the bribe, accept and grant the favour, or accept but
not grant the favour (Barr and Serra 2009a). In the cases where the favour asked by the briber
was delivered, other citizens lost voucher(s), which represent the social and economic cost of
corruption.
In order to investigate the role of professional identity reminders, two message
treatments with change in phrasing were introduced in the fashion of Bryan, Adams, and
Monin 2012’s cheating game. Our messages, however, do not use negative and imperative
wording and come in a booklet that contains practical information before introducing the
game’s rules and instructions. Messages were delivered at the start of the session; they were
positive reminders about good governance behaviour, notified through a written message in
the native language of the participant before giving the instructions of the game. Public
10 The citizens were matched with what corresponds to the average response of public servants to their
request, and were paid accordingly.

8. 8
servants were randomly assigned a no message treatment, a general message treatment, and
a professional identity message treatment. The general message was based on a classical good
governance statement that is often used in Burundi and translates as: Good governance is the
pillar of an equitable and uncorrupted society. The professional identity message contains a
subtle linguistic change reminding them their professional identity before they make a
decision and reads: A real public servant is equitable and incorruptible. The content of the
general message and the professional identity message do not differ ethically and they come
from the same external source. They are, however, expected to have different moral loading,
which means that they affect the participant’s own relationship to what they de ne as right or
wrong. As underlined in the background section, the hypothesis is that the professional
identity message makes it harder for the participant to disconnect their actions from their
identity. The abandonment of professional values is therefore less easy and this should makes
participants less prone to engage in bribery.
2.2 Recruitment
The importance of recruiting participants currently working in the public administration
has already been highlighted. Accordingly, the participants were all public servants. They all
had low-level qualified positions and were deliberately not recruited from managing or senior
positions (such as school principal or police officer).
In order to recruit participants, leaflets and posters advertised the academic study in
workplaces (health centres, schools, ministries). They guaranteed the participant’s
anonymity and a participation fee that included travel expenses. Registration was done by
phone, and was conditional on whether the candidate was indeed a public servant and could
read and write the national language Kirundi.
Throughout each step of the study, recruitment, experiment, survey, and payment, total
anonymity of the participants was respected. The participants played in individual cubicles
and were paid individually after the experiment was finished. At no point were the
participants asked for their names. The post-conflict context of the country, as well as the
sensitive nature of the experiment required this condition to be fulfilled in order to encourage
participation and obtain spontaneous behaviour during the game. Anonymity was also
important to diminish the feeling of being observed which could influence (moral) choices
during the experiment. In order to link the results of the game with the socio-demographic
survey, each participant was identified with a unique number during the study.
2.3 Setting
The experiment took place in December 2013 and January 2014 in a classroom provided
by the University of Burundi in Bujumbura. The game was one-shot and played in paper and
pencil form. After the game, participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their
socio-demographic background. It also entailed questions about their opinions regarding
personal and professional values but did not explicitly mention corruption. The experiment
manager and his lab assistants were Burundians; at no point were foreign experimenters in
contact with participants. The whole session was run in Kirundi to make sure that all the
rules were understood and that a foreign language would not reduce the participant’s
emotional response (Costa et al. 2014). Participants received their pay-off at the end of the
session after having filled in the post-experiment questionnaire. In addition to a lump sum
‘show up’ fee of BIF 5,000 ($3.25), the participants received between BIF 6,000 to BIF
10,000 ($3.75 to $6.25), depending on their decisions during the game. The minimum
amount that could be won during the game (BIF 11,000 - $6.875) corresponds to two days of
daily wage for the less well-paid category of public servant participating in our game.

9. 9
3 Empirical analysis
3.1 Descriptive statistics
Table 1 Basic socio-demographic indicators, by profession
(1)
total
(2)
nurses
(3)
teachers
(4)
clerks
(5)
police
mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd
Gender (female) 0.28 0.45 0.60 0.49 0.15 0.35 0.20 0.40 0.18 0.38
Age (in years) 29.84 5.62 31.38 7.50 28.27 4.24 28.09 4.50 31.59 4.62
Education: primary 0.16 0.36 0.08 0.27 0.01 0.09 0.02 0.12 0.52 0.50
post-secondary 0.65 0.48 0.65 0.48 0.90 0.30 0.90 0.30 0.16 0.37
Internally Displaced 0.20 0.40 0.19 0.39 0.22 0.42 0.17 0.38 0.20 0.40
Returnee 0.13 0.34 0.11 0.32 0.11 0.32 0.11 0.32 0.20 0.40
Exp. of violence (1-4) 1.94 1.49 1.94 1.49 1.95 1.53 1.92 1.46 1.98 1.46
Ex-combatant 0.15 0.36 0.06 0.24 0.04 0.19 0.07 0.25 0.44 0.50
Fish/meat per week 1.03 1.19 1.21 1.30 0.85 1.08 1.26 1.36 0.82 0.87
Never accessed internet 0.52 0.50 0.59 0.49 0.45 0.50 0.32 0.47 0.75 0.43
Observations 527 131 133 131 132
The sample consists of 527 public servants whose basic socio-demographic
characteristics are presented in table 1. Participants of all professional categories are more
likely to be male, except in the health sector. The level of education is remarkably lower in
the police sector. Other indicators are typical of low-income contexts: large household (6.21
members on average), limited access to the internet and computers (which justifies the pen
and paper form of the game), and an important level of material poverty as shown by the low
proportion of households that have a car or motorbike as well as the absence of fish and meat
in daily meals. The level of violence is high and affects the fragile political situation of
Burundi: 62% of the participants declared that their life and the life of their families was
disturbed by violence in the last year. The Burundi police forces were partly made up of ex-
rebels and it is therefore not a surprise that it counts most of the internally displaced persons,
returnees, and ex-combatants.
In the recent years, court of justice officers could earn (monthly) BIF 55,000-250,000,
policemen BIF 20,000-100,000, teachers around BIF 50,000, and nurses between 50,000-
150,000. A new policy introduced at the end of 2012 has tried to harmonize the salaries
between BIF 110,000 and 300,000 a month, according to clear criteria of qualification and
experience.
Table 2 shows the three groups are relatively balanced but not perfectly similar, which
means that controlling for socio-demographic indicators will be important. Similarly, work
experience (table 3) and exposure to corruption (table 4) will also need to be controlled. The
participants have been in their position for variable amount of time (see table 3), with the
police force and the nurses usually having more experience than teachers and court of justice
employees. This may explain why those categories also display higher rates of promotions
and salary increases. The satisfaction of the participants with their job is moderate, and about
30% of the public servants have another job on the side (shop, taxi, etc.). This figure is much
lower in the case of the policemen who are often stationed in barracks and therefore enjoy
less flexibility to engage in a complementary professional activity.

10. 10
Table 2 Socio-demographic indicators by group, by group
Control
Message 1
(standard)
Message 2
(prof. identity)
mean sd mean sd mean sd
Age (in years) 30.03 5.37 29.40 5.16 30.07 6.07
Gender ( female) 0.23 0.41 0.26 0.44 0.34 0.47
Only primary school 0.16 0.36 0.14 0.35 0.18 0.39
Finished secondary school 0.54 0.50 0.51 0.50 0.47 0.50
Catholic 0.70 0.46 0.59 0.49 0.66 0.48
Size of the household 6.11 2.26 6.21 2.37 6.31 2.64
member religious group 0.24 0.43 0.25 0.43 0.27 0.45
cultural / sport group 0.27 0.44 0.36 0.48 0.31 0.47
self-help group 0.30 0.46 0.31 0.46 0.24 0.43
Cell phones in the house 3.13 1.66 3.20 1.65 3.03 1.67
TV set 0.59 0.55 0.59 0.55 0.56 0.71
Radio 1.15 0.67 1.11 0.71 1.11 0.67
Car/motorbike 0.17 0.46 0.14 0.43 0.16 0.42
Catastrophic expenditure 0.55 0.50 0.57 0.50 0.68 0.47
Ex-combatant 0.14 0.35 0.16 0.36 0.16 0.37
Internally Displaced (IDP) 0.19 0.39 0.13 0.34 0.24 0.43
Returnee 0.10 0.31 0.14 0.35 0.14 0.35
Exp. of violence (1-4) 3.09 1.45 3.31 1.43 2.80 1.47
Nurse 0.27 0.44 0.24 0.43 0.24 0.43
Teacher 0.27 0.44 0.24 0.43 0.25 0.44
Justice 0.24 0.43 0.25 0.43 0.26 0.44
Police 0.23 0.42 0.27 0.45 0.25 0.44
Observations 172 173 182
When asked their opinion about the main problems of the country in our post-game
questionnaire, corruption and good governance tops the list of the three main problems
according to the participants. It comes ahead of violence and leadership, with the issues of
ethnic division, human resources, and infrastructure mentioned in one third of the cases or
less and rarely ranked top priorities. When asked who sets the example in terms of good
governance in the country, public servants disagree: the president and his entourage are
cited by 39% of the respondents, especially the policemen who are in part ex-rebels who
fought alongside the president, but the church(es) are a more frequent choice among
teachers.
Table 3 Work experience, by group
(1)
total
(2)
nurses
(3)
teachers
(4)
clerks
(5)
police
mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd
Work experience (year) 3.6 4.50 3.94 5.8 2.91 3.65 2.45 2.17 6.65 5.05
Promoted? 0.28 0.45 0.22 0.2 0.24 0.43 0.20 0.40 0.45 0.50
Had salary increase 0.37 0.48 0.41 0.9 0.33 0.47 0.34 0.48 0.40 0.49
Job satisfaction (0-4) 2.45 1.2 1.96 1.01 2.76 1.17 2.45 1.02 2.62 1.11
Has a second job 0.29 0.45 0.34 0.47 0.30 0.46 0.34 0.47 0.17 0.38
Observations 527 131 133 131 132

11. 11
Finally (table 4), on average our public servants affirm that they are exposed to
corruption from time to time and mention an important level of control of their activities
particularly in health centres. Policemen (and to a lesser extent court staff) received more
training on ‘good governance’. This was mostly as part of the Disarmament, Demobilisation,
and Reintegration (DDR) and capacity-building programmes supported or implemented by
international aid.
Table 4 Experience with corruption, by group
(1)
total
(2)
nurses
(3)
teachers
(4)
clerks
(5)
police
mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd
Governance training 0.29 0.45 0.17 0.8 0.09 0.29 0.37 0.48 0.58 0.50
Sensitization session 0.21 0.41 0.19 0.9 0.19 0.39 0.22 0.42 0.26 0.44
Bribery exposure (0-4) 1.93 1.04 1.79 1.0 1.64 1.00 2.22 0.94 2.06 1.14
Controlled work (0-4) 2.59 0.98 3.01 0.82 2.33 0.95 2.33 0.97 2.73 1.01
Observations 514 128 131 128 127
3.2 Identification strategy
Experimental results are primarily analysed with OLS, Logit, and Count (Poisson)11
regressions, using the following models, with robust standard errors clustered per game
session:
Bit = c + β1T1 + β2T2 + St + εi (1)
Fit = c + β1T1 + β2T2 + St + εi (2)
Bribery (Bit) is the public servant’s behaviour towards money. The instructions specified
that the money taken should correspond to the value of the delivered vouchers. Out of BIF
10,000 in total, a public servant is expected to take only BIF 6,000. Bribe amounts can then
take values from BIF 0 to BIF 4,000, BIF 4,000 representing the maximum bribe amount.
In the Logit model, Bit is a binary variable that takes the value 1 if the participant took more
money than BIF 6,000. Fairness (Fit) is the public servant’s distribution of vouchers. The
instructions specified that every citizen has an equal right to access the limited public service.
Out of 12 vouchers, an equitable public servant should deliver 4 vouchers giving access to the
public service to each citizen. Inequity level can then take values ranging from 0 to 16,
according to the number of vouchers misattributed. These values are necessarily even, as
reattributing a voucher means both depriving one player whilst favouring another. In the
Logit model, Iit is a binary variable that takes the value 1 if the participant allocated her
vouchers in any other way than the equitable 4-4-4. T1 is a dummy indicating whether the
individual was exposed to the first treatment, the standard message, and T2 a dummy for the
identity message. St are fixed effects capturing session-level invariants: sessions were
organised on different days but in the same room and by the same assistants. In alternative
specifications, we also added, Xit, a vector of extra personal covariates that cover basic socio-
demographic indicators (age, education, gender, and wealth), religion, experience of war and
violence, profession and work experience, and exposure to corruption and anti-corruption.
11 We did not use zero-inflated models as there is no reasonable hypothesis of a process explaining the
excess zeros.

12. 12
For 75 observations, there is at least one missing answer to the questionnaire, which
translates as missing values for some socio-demographic variables. We chose to replace those
missing values by the mean value of the variable in the sample.
4 Results
Experimental games were a novelty for all the participants and, despite an effort to
design a game that was as simple as possible and recruit only participants who would read
and write the national language of Kirundi, 35 participants (6.6%) displayed behaviour that
may indicate that they had not understood the principles of the game: they did not take part
of the money corresponding to the vouchers they distributed, and therefore essentially gave
vouchers at a discounted price (or for free).12 These 35 participants were only included in the
analysis at the time of performing robustness checks.
The allocation of vouchers relative to the amount of money taken beyond what was
expected and instructed, suggesting a corrupt behaviour, is represented in the figure below
(figure 1). The most frequent case is, by far, to take the bribe but fairly distribute the vouchers.
Figure 1 Bribe-taking and voucher allocation
12 Out of these 35 ‘outliers’, 11 did not take any money out of the envelopes. This behaviour will be discussed
in the next section.

13. 13
75%
80%
85%
90%
4.1 Bribery
The overall level of bribe-taking is very high: 87.95% of the participants took part of or
the entirety of the bribe. On average, 67.4% of the bribe (BIF 3,373) was taken. When looking
at the data in table 5, there is only a very slight and non-significant difference between the
amount taken in the professional identity message and standard message groups.
Table 5 Effects of the messages on bribe-taking
(1) (2) (3) (4)
OLS OLS Logit Logit
Any message 8.746 -0.199
(182.1) (0.497)
Message 1 (standard) 31.47 -0.250
(157.8) (0.426)
Message 2 (prof. identity) -24.01 -0.110
(233.4) (0.723)
constant 3369.0*** 3373.2*** 0.377*** 0.379***
(125.5) (129.6) (0.0232) (0.0200)
Session FE yes yes yes yes
N 492 492 492 492
The outcome variable is the amount of extra money taken (between BIF 0 and 4,000). | Standard errors in
parentheses, standard errors clustered per session. | *
p < 0.10, **
p < 0.05, ***
p < 0.01
The distributions of the three groups are quite similar, showing again that the attitudes
of the different groups are not very different (figure 2).
Figure 2 distributions of levels of corruption (in BIF of bribe taken), by group
4.2 Public service delivery
76.21% of the participants chose to allocate their 12 vouchers equitably (four vouchers
for each citizen request). On average 0.51 vouchers out of 12 were misattributed. The level of
inequality is computed as |4−V1|+|4−V2|+|4−V3|, where Vi is the number of vouchers in an
0%
2%
4%
6%
8%
10%
12%
14%
16%
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000
no message standard message professional identity message

14. 14
70%
75%
80%
85%
envelope. Very clearly, the 4-4-4 scenario is the one preferred by the participants across the
three treatment groups.
As indicated in table 6, participants who received the standard or the identity message
are less unequal in their voucher distribution. The effect of the standard message is only
borderline significant and valid only for the logit model. The effect of the professional identity
message is, significantly, negative and of a size close to the one of the standard message,
meaning that the added-value of the professional identity may be on the distribution (more
homogenous behaviours than in the case of the standard message). This result holds in all
the aforementioned robustness checks. The Logit -0.423 effect corresponds to a marginal
effect of -0.086.
Table 6 Effects of the messages on equality
(1) (2) (3) (4)
OLS OLS Logit Logit
Any message -0.454* -0.446**
(0.234) (0.220)
Message 1 (standard) -0.458 -0.461*
(0.311) (0.266)
Message 2 (prof. identity) -0.449** -0.423**
(0.185) (0.208)
constant 1.293*** 1.292*** -0.348*** -0.348***
(0.161) (0.155) (0.00890) (0.0107)
Session FE yes yes yes yes
N 492 492 492 492
Standard errors in parentheses, standard errors clustered per session.
*
p < 0.10, **
p < 0.05, ***
p < 0.01
The difference between the distributions is noticeable, especially between the control and
two intervention groups.
Figure 3 distributions of levels of inequality (0 = equal), by group
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
0 2 4 6 8 14 16
no message standard message professional identity message

15. 15
4.3 Relation between bribe-taking and public service delivery
The bribe-taking and public service delivery aspects of the experiment are, to a large
extent, independent from each other. They are correlated with a set of variables that are quite
different. Even when controlling for covariates in an OLS model, there is no statistically
significant correlation between them at a p<0.1 level. Looking at the situation using a binary
angle, there is still no association between the two dimensions (table 7).
The most frequent combination is accepting a bribe while being equitable in voucher
distribution. 67.07% of the participants adopt this behaviour. Only 9.64% of the participants
are both insensitive to the bribe and equal in distribution, thus respecting the two rules of
the game and being a model public. Only a fifth of the sample chooses to give some extra
vouchers away when taking the bribe.
Table 7 Association between voucher allocation and bribe-taking
bribe-taking (%)
unequal allocation (%) No Yes
No 9.64 67.07
Yes 2.41 20.88
Pearson’s Chi2
p-value
0.4141
0.520
4.4 Characteristics associated with bribe-taking and fairness
The data allows to explore further the profile that are most commonly associated with
corrupt and unfair behaviour. To do this, we simply added the vector of covariates Xit to the
models 1 and 2.
In terms of corruption/bribe-taking (table 8), Catholics as well as people who are more
experienced in their job and have been promoted are more likely to take the bribe. The rest
of the results is not consistent across the two models. Controlling for a set of variables,
teachers and court clerks take in average less money than nurses (the control group) and far
less than police but they are not more or less corrupt when considering whether they take
any money at all (the binary model).
In terms of equal distribution of vouchers, being a public servant in the judiciary sector
has a significant negative impact on inequity that holds across the different models. Exposure
to campaigns of sensitisation again corruption, exposure to corruption, and training on good
governance principles also bring more equal behaviour, but these results do not totally hold
in the logit model.
The robustness of the results was checked using a series of different specifications. In
both the bribery taking and inequity in public service cases, we tested the models again (i)
gradually adding groups of covariates on personal characteristics, (ii) using the professional
category means rather than general means when imputing missing variables, (iii) inserting a
dummy controlling for the observations whose covariate dataset is incomplete and including
outliers, and (iv) squaring the outcome variable. The message effects are consistent across
the different models. Although they do loose significance they keep the expected sign when
dividing the sample by professional groups.

16. 16
Table 8 Characteristics associated with bribe-taking and fairness
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Bribe-taking
(logit)
Bribe-taking
(OLS)
Inequality
(logit)
Inequality
(OLS)
Treatment Message 1
(standard)
-0.0789 136.9 -0.411 -0.446
(0.439) (170.2) (0.310) (0.324)
Message 2
(prof. identity)
-0.142 -11.79 -0.443** -0.501**
(0.657) (227.1) (0.213) (0.174)
Basic
demographics
Age -0.0307 -17.66 -0.0261 -0.0182
(0.0274) (13.17) (0.0263) (0.0208)
Gender 0.435 74.02 0.0432 0.0375
(0.437) (159.2) (0.197) (0.160)
Education -0.189 -81.88* 0.177 0.133
(0.123) (40.85) (0.108) (0.115)
Wealth1 0.351 479.6 -1.164 -0.326
(1.541) (626.0) (0.962) (0.918)
Catholic 0.668* 346.3** -0.142 -0.113
(0.356) (139.6) (0.281) (0.223)
Experience of
violence/war†
Ex-combatant 0.870 333.8* 0.319 0.590
(0.604) (172.0) (0.445) (0.400)
IDP -0.403 -54.12 0.0116 0.123
(0.483) (212.8) (0.311) (0.255)
Returnee -0.308 -153.8 -0.119 -0.260*
(0.565) (280.0) (0.243) (0.147)
Exp. violence -0.157 -54.24 0.00967 0.0294
(0.111) (37.68) (0.0919) (0.0653)
Professional
identity
Teacher2 0.231 -1488.6*** 0.825 -0.563
(2.321) (271.6) (1.020) (0.335)
Court clerk2 -1.425 -1233.4*** -1.241*** -1.307***
(0.901) (132.7) (0.206) (0.139)
Police2 -2.562 1185.7*** 0.136 -0.605
(2.359) (238.0) (1.097) (0.559)
Experience3 0.0839** 41.14** 0.0134 0.00131
(0.0394) (16.13) (0.0250) (0.0215)
Vocation4 0.249 107.7* 0.103 0.0507
(0.194) (57.03) (0.114) (0.102)
Promotion4 1.183*** 219.4 0.0622 0.0644
(0.448) (126.0) (0.305) (0.202)
Satisfaction5 -0.123 -45.12 -0.318* -0.195
(0.177) (63.93) (0.178) (0.120)
Work control5 0.212 52.57 0.0526 0.0129
(0.129) (57.18) (0.121) (0.0971)
Professional
exp. with
corruption
Sensitisation6 0.0393 -80.69 -0.525* -0.516**
(0.411) (157.2) (0.296) (0.233)
Exposure7 0.0138 -45.41 -0.216** -0.0317
(0.173) (68.92) (0.0909) (0.0839)
Training6 0.0967 66.04 -0.623** -0.258
(0.269) (134.3) (0.303) (0.241)
constant 0.339 4092.6*** 0.943 2.376***
(1.752) (768.8) (1.087) (0.777)
Session FE yes yes yes yes
N 492 492 492 492
Standard errors in parentheses, standard errors clustered per session.
*
p < 0.10, **
p < 0.05, ***
p < 0.01
1. Wealth is a mean index made of the z-scores of the following indicators: weekly consumption of fish or
meat, ownership of a mobile phone, car, TV set, and radio, all weighted by the size of the household. | All
dummies: belonging to a religious, cultural or self-help group | † All dummies except Experience of violence
which is the answer to the question how much has violence disrupted your family life in the past year, on a
scale from 1 to 5, 5 being very disrupted. | 2. Teacher, Justice, and Police are professional categories, with

17. 17
respect to nurses, which is the reference category. | 3. Experience is the number of years of experience. | 4.
Vocation and promotion are dummies that take the value one if the participant had been promoted or does
a job they consider their vocation. | 5. Satisfaction and Work Control are each on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5
the most satisfied / controlled in their work. | 6. Sensitization and training are whether the participant
received a sensitization or a training session on good governance. | 7. Exposure ranges from 1 to 5, with 5
being participants who say they are very often the subject of bribery attempts.
4.5 Heterogeneous effects
The results presented under 4.4 as well as the literature and Transparency
International’s East Africa Bribery index suggest potential heterogeneous effects between
the different socio-professional categories. In the table below, the following interaction
models are estimated:
Bit = c + β1T1 + β2T2 + ∑(β1mJmT1 + β2mJmT2
3
𝑚
) + St + εi (3)
Fit = c + β1T1 + β2T2 + ∑(β1mJmT1 + β2mJmT2
3
𝑚
) + St + εi (4)
where all the variables are unchanged from models 1 and 2 at the exception of J1, J2, and J3,
which are dummies for teachers, court clerks, and the police with health workers as a
reference category.
Table 9 heterogeneous effects associated with socio-professional category
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Bribe-taking
OLS
Bribe-taking
Logit
Inequality
OLS
Inequality
Logit
Message 1 (standard) -34.44 0.0852 -0.167 -0.193
(190.7) (0.703) (1.151) (0.519)
Message 2 (prof. identity) 348.3*** 12.10*** -2.489*** -14.16***
(101.7) (0.935) (0.614) (0.788)
Teacher -1104.5* 1.149 -0.504 0.842
(571.5) (2.332) (0.752) (1.072)
Teacher * M1 29.56 -0.538 0.239 0.365
(281.2) (0.950) (1.159) (0.541)
Teacher * M2 -238.5 -11.19*** 2.538*** 14.30***
(223.3) (1.667) (0.618) (0.800)
Court clerk -862.0 -0.00446 -1.063 -0.597
(556.5) (1.525) (0.750) (0.845)
Clerk * M1 -27.94 -0.797 -0.376 -0.810
(482.1) (1.522) (1.269) (1.167)
Clerk * M2 -532.0 -12.85*** 1.846** 13.27***
(671.5) (1.817) (0.709) (0.936)
Police 1768.2*** -0.903 -0.559 0.232
(380.4) (2.100) (0.430) (1.055)
Police * M1 242.4 0.159 -0.989 -0.738
(425.6) (1.122) (1.229) (0.553)
Police * M2 -207.6 -11.97*** 1.743** 13.72***
(352.3) (1.067) (0.669) (0.818)
constant 3390.2*** 0.399*** 2.006*** -0.339***
(199.7) (0.0926) (0.478) (0.0383)
Session FE yes yes yes yes
N 492 492 492 492
Standard errors in parentheses, standard errors clustered per session.
*
p < 0.10, **
p < 0.05, ***
p < 0.01

18. 18
As expected, there are clear heterogeneous effects. They are robust to introducing
additional covariates and using a count model. These effects are also visible when simply
representing the mean value for the variables bribe-taking and fairness by socio-professional
category and intervention group (Figures 5 and 6).
In terms of bribe-taking, the only category reacting as expected are the court clerks who
take less money after being exposed to the standard message and even (slightly) less when
exposed to the professional identity message (the difference between the two treatment
groups is not significant). The other groups display less coherent behaviour, in particular the
nurses of the standard intervention who take significantly more money than both the control
and second intervention groups.
Figure 4 Effects on bribe-taking by socio-professional category and intervention group
In terms of vouchers allocation, the behaviours of the clerks and health workers are
driving the effect observed at the aggregated level, with a similar relative decrease in the level
of unfairness for both categories but a much higher starting point for the health workers. The
effect of the messages is also visible on the police, but interestingly it is the standard message
rather than the professional identity message that has the strongest effect.
Figure 5 Effects on fairness by socio-professional category and intervention group
There is no significant interaction effects between either message and the exposure,
sensitisation, and training of the civil servant has received to and on corruption. This result
is robust to a series of alternative specifications and grouping the two interventions.
Combined with the results of table 6, it could suggest a long-lasting effect of initiatives that
seek to curb corruption.
2500
3000
3500
4000
no message standard message professional identity
message
health workers teachers court clerks police
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
no message standard message professional identity
message
health workers teachers court clerks police

19. 19
Four key results emerge from the experiment: (1) none of the messages influence the
propensity to accept a bribe, (2) only the message that calls attention to professional identity
has an impact on the way public servants allocate vouchers, i.e. public service delivery; (3)
the bribery and public service delivery dimensions are not correlated; and (4) the type of
professional identity matters: nurses, teachers, court clerks, and police react differently to
anti-corruption messages.
5 Discussion
This section discusses the results in terms of bribery, then in terms of public service
delivery, before commenting on the interaction between these two dimensions as well as
methodological caveats and prospects.
5.1 Bribery
The professional identity message is negatively correlated with bribe-taking, but this
correlation is not statistically significant. After excluding measurement issues, three main
categories of hypotheses remain for explaining this insignificant result:
Firstly, the experiment disentangled the bribe-taking and public service dimensions,
allowing the public servant to take the bribe without delivering the favour asked by the briber.
This means that, unlike in many bribery games, the amount of bribe taken does not
necessarily affect public service delivery. In other words, bribe-taking in the game is
compatible with an equitable allocation of vouchers. The latter, which was an option chosen
by a majority of the participants, might be enough for a participant to think of themselves as
a good civil servant, especially in a context whose social norms may not be the same as those
of high-income industrialised countries (Sardan 1999).
Secondly, the situation of public servants is often precarious in Burundi, and the high
level of bribe-taking and the insignificant result of the professional identity message may be
need rather than greed-induced. The BIF 4,000 extra is a non-negligible amount, especially
for teachers and policemen whose salaries still remain comparatively low. Need-induced
corruption is invoked when institutions are weak and salaries are so low that any opportunity
to augment household budget is grasped, which could be the case of some of the participants.
Yet, it remains likely that for other civil servants corruption is more greed-induced, in the
sense that people have enough to satisfy their basic needs but cannot resist bene ting from a
tempting situation (Ndikumana 2006).
Thirdly, the design of the game creates a peculiar environment in which the participants
are totally anonymous and may feel under little or no scrutiny. This design was important to
make sure the game would take place smoothly in the aforementioned context. The context
created by the experiment may, however, not be disconnected from real-life situations in
developing countries: citizens with limited social capital often have little bargaining power
when attempting to obtain extra illegal services from poorly monitored public servants. This
being said, scrutiny of public servants is likely to be higher in an office rather than in a lab
and well-connected citizens may be in a position to monitor the public servant’s behaviour.
The form of the prompts that were used to remind the participant of their identity is also
peculiar: the best available option was to use written messages about the professional identity
of the participant inside a leaflet that included basic information about the experiment
(timing, practical information, etc.). Even though messages were carefully composed in
Kirundi and tested several times, it is possible that the participant saw the message, which
reminded them of the social norms associated with their profession, but failed to change her
behaviour having a different opinion of what constitute a public servant’s typical behaviour.
In a recent study on bankers’ social norms in Switzerland, Cohn, Fehr, and Maréchal 2014

20. 20
shed light on the power of professional self-identity, showing that reminding bankers of their
profession has a negative impact on their ethical behaviour. The business culture of the
Burundian public administration is plagued with corruption and reminding the participants
that a good public servant is equitable and incorruptible might sound as a wishful thinking
rather than an efficient professional identity reminder to some of the participants.
From game theory, and taking the anonymity, the lack of sanction, the one-shot feature
of the game, and the local context into account, the expected bribery level is expected to be
very high, i.e. taking the value BIF 4 ,000 for most if not all participants (Barr and Serra
2009b). However, only 79.6% of the participants did choose this extreme option. This is
consistent with other one-shot and no risk of detection corruption games played in Western
countries: Frank and Schulze 2000 find 88% and Barr and Serra 2009a report that 81.5% of
their public servant participants indicated that they would accept bribes over a certain
threshold.
5.2 Public service delivery
The professional identity message, unlike the standard message, is negatively and
significantly correlated with the level of inequity in vouchers allocation. Public servant
participants who were reminded of the qualities expected from their profession allocated
vouchers more equally amongst citizens. This result seems to confirm some effect of the
professional identity message on public service delivery (p<0.01).
In line with Fehr and Schmidt 2001, we observe that most people behave equitably when
no cost is implied. Our main hypothesis to explain the mechanism behind this result is the
salience of moral costs induced by the professional identity reminder. When reminded of
their professional identity, bowing to the demand of the briber who asks for an unequal
voucher allocation is rendered more difficult for the bribee. Petty corruption experiments
involving negative externalities, contextual framing and intermediaries’ effects have already
shown that moral costs are an important determinant in bribery decision-making. Barr and
Serra 2009b found that negative externalities combined with a corruption framing scenario
are associated with less bribe-acceptance. In our game, the corrupt behaviour of a public
servant not only harms the citizens through negative externalities, it also potentially damages
the self-image of the public servant through a personal moral cost. If people behaving
unethically indeed typically try to disconnect their actions from their image, the professional
identity message reduces the distance that could otherwise have made inequity tolerable. The
identity reminder brings them ’back’ to a socially desirable objective. Drugov, Hamman, and
Serra 2013 show that the use of intermediaries acting as facilitators in a corrupt transaction
increases the level of corruption by lowering the moral costs of both citizens and public
officials. Our experiment links these moral costs with self-identity.
The main hypothesis, because the emphasis was on the public service and the game
played with public servants, is that professional identity was at play in the experiment. Yet,
it may be that mostly the social norms aspect of the message had an effect. If this is the case,
the public servant participants would have been reminded of how to behave in the society
they are part of but would not necessarily have felt threatened in their professional self-
image. They would, in this case, rather have felt threatened about their image as a general
citizen, and the sort of identity at play would not be professional. It is important to note that,
even in this situation, the stimuli would essentially be related to the way the public servant
perceives herself in relationship with her identity, which, as literature has shown, is
essentially a social construct that includes values and norms.
We could not identify interaction effects of the professional identity message with socio-
demographic and professional covariates, which seems to indicate that the message has an
impact across a wide range of public servants.

21. 21
The scenario of the present experiment is based on a basic public service that is limited
in quantity and where bribe-taking does not imperatively involve favour delivery. As
mentioned earlier, a possible way to interpret these results is in terms of reciprocity to the
briber. 76.71% of the participants decided not to reciprocate the favour asked by the briber.
Allowing participants to take the bribe without delivering the favour in the game may have
contributed to this high figure since participants who chose to take the bribe could do so
without paying back the briber. The one-shot nature of the game could also have contributed
to this high figure. As shown by Abbink 2002, repeating a bribery game with the same
participants, and increasing the level of personal interaction with the briber, contributes to
increasing reciprocity.
5.3 Relation between bribery and public service delivery
The experimental design intentionally differentiated two aspects: the bribe itself and the
social costs associated with it in the case of the delivery of a rationed public service. This
rationing scenario is potentially close to reality: most goods and services offered by the public
sector, especially in low-income countries, are de facto rivalrous.
The aim of the present article is not to weight the relative importance of each dimension.
It only shows that, in a context where there is no automatic mechanism between bribe-taking
and service delivery: (1) participants often take all the briber’s money, but (2) a majority of
participants are nonetheless attached to the equitable service delivery instructed at the
beginning of the game and at the core of democratic public services. They choose an equitable
allocation of vouchers, even when offered some money to behave otherwise, and even more
so when reminded of their professional identity.
The fact that the professional identity message only impacts the level of inequity and
that the latter is not correlated with the level of bribe-taking suggests that the participants
separate the two dimensions. This is further confirmed by the lack of correlation between two
dimensions and the fact that they do not correlate with the same socio-demographic
variables. The results therefore allow trying to assess whether micro-determinants of
corruption related to identity that are acknowledged in the literature are bribe-induced or
equity-induced.
Some professional identities do matter more than others, as highlighted by the strong
differences found between the four socio-professional categories. What exactly is happening
remains unclear but the message seems to speak more to public servants who enjoy a
reputation of being, relatively speaking, more integer and honest such as court clerks and
health workers –this even when controlling for the fact that the socio-economic profiles of
the four groups of civil servants are different. Interestingly, trainings and past exposure to
sensitisation messages on good governance and anti-corruption also are correlated to more
equitable behaviours but not to bribe-taking. This supports our argument that sensitization
programmes may have an impact on improving equity in service delivery but not necessarily
on curbing bribe-taking propensity. It is unclear whether the slight and not robust Catholic
effect is a Protestant effect as described by Serra (2006) as: (i) the Muslim group, although
underrepresented, is also negatively correlated with inequity; (ii) Protestant groups are
relatively new in Burundi and in competition with the Catholic Church which means that
unobservable variables could explain adherence to a Protestant group and a preference for
equal outcomes.
The research contributes little to understanding the dynamics of bribe-taking. It only
suggest that they are different from fairness and potentially harder to address through
sensitisation messages. Variables related to the war experience do not robustly correlate with

22. 22
bribery-taking, making it complicated to pursue previous analyses on the topic further (Voors
et al. 2012). The only finding, which is not the most robust and coming from the more
descriptive data, suggests that work experience and having had a promotion, are associated
with higher levels of bribe-taking. These experience and promotion effects cannot be
mistaken for an age effect as this variable is significantly negatively associated with bribe
taking –they seen to confirm a ‘culture’ of corruption that develops over careers.
5.4 Methodological observations and prospects
Participant’s self-selection is a classic issue in behavioural economics, which also applies
to the present study. Participants voluntarily enrolled into the study. Similarly to students
participating to a lab on-campus experiment, they may not represent the general population
of interest (Charness, Gneezy, and Kuhn 2013). This problem is however mitigated by the
fact that participants to the experiment coincide exactly with the population of interest:
actual public servants played the game.
The high level of bribe-taking in our experiment is similar to other lab experiments,
which were all conducted with students; our results however differ from the low-level of
corruption civil servants Alatas et al. 2009 found in their experiment in Indonesia. Apart
from the cultural difference between our participants and theirs, different levels of scrutiny
(especially anonymity and game venue) and difference in game design could possibly explain
part of the divergence between our results. As for other experiments, the external validity of
this experiment on corruption is limited the perception of the public service is different in
different countries, even within the Great Lakes region, and replicating the experiment in
neighbouring Rwanda, Tanzania and DR Congo would certainly be interesting. Similarly, it
would be important to try to confront these results with out-of-the-lab impact evaluations.
Although lab-in-the-field experiment sometimes bring results similar to field experiments
(Armantier and Boly 2013), it is not always necessary the case (see Serra 2011 and Olken
2007). Our results need to be exploited carefully, keeping in mind the context of Bujumbura
in December 2013. They are precious to understand the rationale of civil servants facing
bribery in the fragile, low-income, Central African context of Burundi.
5.5 Conclusion
Our lab-in-the-field experiment directly observes public servants behaviour in a
dilemma of moral values when confronted with a bribery temptation. The results helps
understanding the channels of corruption mechanisms and estimating the policy leverage of
professional identity reminders. It shows that reminding public servants of the moral values
of honesty and equity associated with the public service may lead them to make fairer choice
towards citizen’s participants, but not necessarily to take less bribe. On this ground and in
the context of low scrutiny of the experiment, we argue that professional identity or the values
associated to it can induce some more ethical behaviour, even in post-conflict societies where
the public service is generally perceived as corrupt, inequitable, and inefficient.
In terms of research, the present article sheds light on new possibilities to study different
aspects of corruption mechanisms. It shows that the personal gain and concern with equity
in public service delivery are not influenced by the same factors and, in a context of very low
scrutiny and in a post-conflict environment, are not even correlated. Moreover, and
importantly, the article confirms the importance of the self-perception of professional image
in understanding corruption.
The policy implications of this paper are directly dependent on the external validity of
the experiment, both beyond the lab and beyond the Burundi context. Donors and
governments have spent important amounts of money to improve the governance of fragile
states. Corrupt administrations and corruption are described as a major impediment to the

23. 23
stability and development of countries like Burundi, and recent violence in Bujumbura have
shown that the topic matters for Burundian citizens. In this context, it is both risky and
necessary to attempt to formulate some policy recommendations. A sensible lesson from the
experiment is that sensitization campaign can work, but need to play on the right incentives
and touch the right values. Sensitization campaigns based on identity need yet to be tested in
non-lab context, but based on our game they appear as a non-expensive approach with some
impact on public service delivery. This could be, in terms of short-run cost-effectiveness,
more interesting than large but often unenforced anti-corruption legal arsenal. It is also
important for policy-makers to make decisions about the objectives of such sensitization
campaign; as our experiment shows, sensitization campaign can probably lead to behaviours
that are less harmful for the community, but we could not find any impact of it diminishing
the level of bribe acceptance.

24. 24
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