In many societies, the power to punish is granted to a centralized authority. While the punishment of free-riders has been shown to play an important role in the provision of public goods, corruption might strongly disrupt the ability of a centralized authority to foster cooperation. In this...

Corruption is a welfare issue worldwide, but it is difficult to study because of its secret nature. We here did a lab economic experiment on bribery to study different compliance mechanisms through which people might be deterred from corruption. We focused on two elements of norms which people...

The soccer referee stands in for a judge. Soccer’s Video Assistant Referee (“VAR”) system stands in for algorithms that augment human deciders. Fair play stands in for justice. They are combined and set in a polycentric system of governance, with implications for designing, administering,...

A common phenomenon in tax administration in developing countries is that tax is collected not according to the rules of law but according to informal agreements between taxpayers and tax collectors. This article offers a novel explanation of this phenomenon in the Chinese context in terms of...

This article analyzes how law enforcers (with particular emphasis on securities regulators) should allocate their limited resources among multiple targets, as well as how they are likely to allocate these resources. It modifies existing models in one significant way: it considers the effect of...

In this paper we review some recent work on public intervention in economic environments where firms undertake investments in research or in physical assets, and then select appropriate business practices to extract profits from the outcomes of the investment process. Public policies may take...

This paper aims to study corruption as an epidemic phenomenon using the epidemic diffusion model of Kermack and Mc-Kendrick (1927). We seek to determine the dynamics of corruption and its impact on the composition of the population at a given time. We determine a threshold epidemiological...

This analysis investigates a political corruption model that builds on previous literature on corruption in hierarchies. Our study enriches the literature on political corruption emphasizing the contrasting role of the minorities having a control role of the majorities. In particular, this paper...

We investigate the effects of an institutional mechanism that incentivizes taxpayers to blow the whistle on collusive corruption and tax compliance. We explore this through a formal leniency program. In our experiment, we nest collusive corruption within a tax evasion framework. We not only...