Summary
In this study, Hanna and Wang use data from laboratory experiments and surveys with both university students and civil servants in India to exhibit evidence that dishonest Indian students are more likely to prefer to enter government service and cheating in the experiment predicts corrupt behavior by civil servants. The results of the dice task suggest that the laboratory measure of dishonesty can be regarded as a valid predictor of future corruption. In addition, the results of the dictator game show that students with strong pro-social preferences are less likely to prefer government jobs. On the other hand, students' outcomes on an explicit game and their attitudes towards corruption do not systematically relate to their job preferences. Therefore, the current screening mechanism focusing on choosing civil servants based on their abilities might not change the average propensity for corruption. In general, Hanna and Wang conducted interesting experiments to provide novel evidence to show that negative selection into government sector might contribute to corruption in the future.
The first contribution of this…show more content… To deal with this issue, they used a dice task to obtain an individual measure of dishonesty. Specifically, they asked each student in the experiment to roll a dice 42 times and to report the number of each roll. Based on the reported number, each student was able to receive INR 0.5 for each higher value on the dice he reports. Thus, by observing how far each individual's distribution of reports is from the uniform distribution, Hanna and Wang were able to deduce whether or not an individual lied. In particular, since only the student oneself knew with certainty the actual value of dice he rolls, he would feel comfortable even when he