The paper explores a game-theoreticmodel of petty corruption involving a sequence of entrepreneurs and a track of bureaucrats. Each entrepreneur's project is approved if and only if it is cleared by each bureaucrat. The project value is stochastic; its value is observed only by the entrepreneur,...

This note reports part of a larger study of petty corruption by government bureaucrats in the process of approving new business projects. Each bureaucrat may demand a bribe as a condition of approval. Entrepreneurs use the services of an intermediary who, for a fee, undertakes to obtain all of...

We use a model of real-time decentralized information processing to understand how constraints on human information processing affect the returns to scale of organizations. We identify three informational (dis)economies of scale: diversification of heterogeneous risks (positive), sharing of...