Corruption and social capital: an experimental study

We would like to explore the link between corruption and social capital, such as trust, through an online experiment. Specifically, we want to investigate whether public officials are less likely to request bribes when they know their actions are observable by a third party investor. Moreover, we would like to examine whether female public officials behave differently from their male counterparts when their corruptive behavior can be observed by a third party investor. Additionally, we will assess whether reduced corruptive behavior signals greater trustworthiness to future senders and if senders based their trust on public officials' history of bribe requests and rejections. Moreover, we examine sender's trust differences based on their genders. Lastly, we want to investigate the underlying mechanism that may have triggered the behavior differences.