Commercial Bribery in China: Deterrence and Compliance

• In Event: EUROC 7 - Corruption and the Private Sector

Abstract

This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention measures in deterring commercial bribery in China. Deterrence describes that in the decision-making process of committing a crime, individuals typically weigh the perceived costs and benefits. If the perceived costs of the crime exceed the benefits, then the likelihood of committing the crime would decrease. At least theoretically, increasing the costs of crime should effectively deter most offenders. However, empirical findings in the fields of white-collar and corporate crime deterrence show that, with a few exceptions, the support for the deterrence hypothesis reported in the literature is limited and conditional. This hypothesis is also often criticized for ignoring the complexity of decision-making, as individuals might choose not to commit the crime for various reasons, with deterrence being just one factor. Therefore, if an intervention measure can effectively reduce the intention to bribe, considering various factors that may inhibit or enable the likelihood of engaging in bribery, then it might be interpreted as having a deterrent effect.
Overall, this study focuses on exploring to what extent people's intentions to engage in bribery are reduced by interventions after controlling for various personal and situational factors that might affect an individual's intention to engage in bribery. Particularly, at the level of personal factors, we explore an aspect rarely examined in deterrence research—people's emotional reactions. Specifically, our data come from employees and managers of private enterprises in China. We use a vignette-based factorial survey to investigate what factors or specific combinations of factors influence the likelihood of individuals engaging in bribery and to assess the impact of different intervention measures on bribery intentions. Furthermore, by using interviews, this study aims to understand how these factors inhibit or enable people's intentions, and how people perceive the intervention measures.

Author

• Jing Wei, The University of Manchester