Civic Honesty In The Italian Mafia

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Honesty is one of the core values that help build common culture and integrity within society and, therefore, directly improves relationships, cooperation behaviour and economic development (Zsolnai 2004). In contrast, dishonest practices such as fraud and corruption, especially in business, impact the functioning of the market (Rose-Ackerman 2001) and cause immense financial and reputational damage (e.g. Enron, Tycom or WorldCom). Whilst the outcome of honest civic behaviour is usually observable, the drivers thereof have not been fully investigated, despite being studied in great variety (e.g. Darley & Batson 1973, Fischbacher & Föllmi-Heusi 2013).
Civic honesty is certainly determined by legal institutions such as the rules of law or property
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By conducting a field lost wallet experiment, which is based on the classical lost letter technique (Merritt & Fowler 1948), the author collected observable data about civic honesty. Wallets (n=800) containing business cards of a fictional owner were turned in at receptions of public and private institutions (i.e. banks, hotels, cultural institutions, public and postal offices). A receiver was indicated as being honest if the apparent owner was contacted by e-mail. The study was conducted in the 16 most populated cities in Italy. These cities experience different levels of Mafia presence - provided by Transcrime (2013) - as measured by the Mafia Presence Index (MPI). Additional experimental manipulation made it possible to investigate whether the presence of the Mafia changes the economic benefit of keeping a wallet when money was included in the wallet. By introducing a priming treatment to remind recipients about the power of the Italian Mafia, the author examined whether an extended threat of punishment changes honest behaviour, especially across cities with different levels of Mafia involvement. The fear of being punished for not returning a wallet may be suggested to be more prevalent in cities with high Mafia infiltration where the accepted social behaviour is to collaborate with the fictional …show more content…
A brief overview of civic honesty in Italy and the origin and characteristics of the Italian Mafia are discussed. Sections 3 and 4 illustrate the experimental designs and the data used. The results are presented in Section 5 and the subsequent Section 6 provides robustness checks for the findings. The main findings and limitations are discussed in Section 7, which also covers an outline for further

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