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The Evolution of Bribery

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Abstract

This paper studies the dynamics of bribery between citizens and bureaucrats when the former approach the latter in request of a public service that requires an administrative procedure. The study is based in an agent-based model that uses the behavioral results from the experimental economics literature. Citizens adapt their bribe levels through social learning. Bureaucrats develop their decisions through both individual and social learning mechanisms. Unlike most bribery models, this one is inspired in the structural and institutional characteristics of corruption in developing countries, specifically: Latin America. This work is focused in two objectives: simulate the notion of bribery stable levels as a “social convention” through evolutionary social learning, and to compare two scenarios for hypothesis testing. The experiment tests the hypothesis that, in societies with disparities in the impact of the social cost of corruption, bribery remains higher than in those with a homogeneous impact distribution. The results show that it is not enough to focus on the incentives of bureaucrats. It is necessary to study the citizens’ incentives as well, in order to reduce bribery in developing economies.

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... Network representations provide analytical frameworks to study the relationships between individual decision-making and group behavior at higher levels of abstraction (i.e., macro-outcomes). When data collection is costly (either in terms of time or money (Louie & Carley, 2008;Armantier & Boly, 2008)), it is useful to design experiments based on the implications of analytical results (Hammond, 2000;Guerrero, 2011;Epstein, 1999;Abbink, 2004;Wang & Zhang, 2008;Lambert, Majumdar & Radner, 2007;Blanchard, Krueger, & Martin, 2005). In particular, in evaluating anti-corruption strategies it is of interest to characterize the economy of influences underlying the offer and acceptance of bribes in contact networks. ...
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