Institutions, Norms, and Accountability: A Corruption Experiment with Northern and Southern Italians

Anti-corruption research has highlighted the potential for grassroots monitoring to improve governance outcomes, but the conditions under which citizens are willing to report bribery remain under-studied. Are individuals from some societies socialized into a “culture of corruption” that makes them more accepting of malfeasance, or is the failure to denounce wrongdoing simply a response to low-quality enforcement institutions? I conduct a laboratory experiment to examine how the propensity to report corruption differs between Northern and Southern Italians, two populations experiencing different levels of corruption in everyday life. For each group, I experimentally manipulate the quality of enforcement institutions. When given high-quality institutions, all participants are more willing to report corruption. Moreover, Southerners and Northerners behave similarly when placed within the same institutional environments. These results suggest that high-corruption societies are not “culturally” predisposed to tolerate malfeasance. Rather, improving the capacity of enforcement institutions may significantly strengthen accountability norms.

Quality of Outsourced Services, Opportunism and Contract Design

This paper estimates the impact of contract design on the enforceability of quality in outsourced public contracts. Using panel data from 102 cleaning contracts, our results suggest that quality enforcement depends highly on the

On the Problem of Quality Enforcement in Centralized Public Procurement

Demand aggregation is widely recognized as a efficiency-enhancing solution in public procurement. The technique of framework agreements represents possibly the most effective solution to struck a balance between contract standardization and customization. Central purchasing organizations in many countries are progressively relying on framework agreements to aggregate demand of different public buyers. By splitting the procurement process (until the award phase) between separate entities, such an organizational model in public procurement may, however, generate low incentives to enforce quality at the contract execution stage. In this paper, we review some evidence of contract mismanagement borrowing from the experience of the National Frame Contracts awarded by Consip S.p.A. in Italy and also discuss possible remedies.