Chapter 6: The Dark Side of the Gift in Organizations: When Gift-Giving Becomes Bribery and Corruption

The gift and its logic is not a new topic for philosophy, anthropology, sociology, or psychology, where it has been well-known for decades. Economics, particularly behavioral economics, has dealt with gift-giving as an alternative or complementary explanation to cooperation, altruism, trust, and reciprocity (Carmichael & MacLeod, 1997). Many authors experimented on the “gift-exchange game” in order to explain behaviors in economic contexts (Charness, Frechette, & Kagel, 2004; Falk, 2007; Fehr, Kirchsteiger, & Riedl, 1993), and particularly in the labor market context (Akerlof, 1982, 1984; Brandts & Charness, 2004, Gneezy & List, 2006), and also in the workplace (Abeler, Altmann, Kube, & Wibral, 2010; Dodlova & Yudkevich, 2009; Maximiano, Sloof, & Sonnemans, 2007).