Do individuals consider bribery as an acceptable behavior? We use a newly-designed game to study if—and under which conditions—bystanders are willing to express disapproval for bribing behavior through costly punishment. We manipulate two key dimensions: the benefits accrued by corrupt actors and the externality imposed on idle victims. We show that on average bystanders were unresponsive nearly half of the time they witnessed bribery. We also find that context specificity matters, as bystanders were more willing to punish when bribing caused them a disadvantageous inequity with respect to corrupt actors, even if bribing enhanced overall welfare. In an additional experiment testing whether social norms play any role in punishment decisions, we find that norms did not align with the observed bystanders’ behavior. This further supports our main result that bystanders did not react to bribery due to a concern for the social norm, but rather for their own comparative disadvantage relative to corrupt actors.

个人是否认为贿赂是可以接受的行为？我们使用一种新设计的游戏来研究旁观者是否（在何种情况下）是否愿意通过昂贵的惩罚来表示对贿赂行为的反对。我们操纵两个关键方面：腐败行为者获得的利益和对无所事事的人的外部性。我们表明，平均而言，旁观者有近一半的时间没有看到贿赂。我们还发现情境的特殊性很重要，因为行贿者更愿意在行贿时惩罚他们，使行贿者在腐败行为者方面处于不利的不平等状态，即使行贿增加了整体福利。在另一项测试中，社会规范在惩罚决策中是否起任何作用，我们发现规范与观察到的旁观者的行为不符。