Does bribery help or hurt firm growth? Some suggest that bribery greases the wheel of commerce, while others believe that bribery sands the wheel of growth. We argue that firms endogenously choose their level of bribery according to their environments and that the benefits and costs may differ for different types of bribery. Specifically, small firms are more likely to be forced to engage in br...

Bribery in elections is an important problem in computational social choice theory. We introduce and study two important special cases of the classical $BRIBERY problem, namely, FRUGAL-BRIBERY and FRUGAL-$BRIBERY where the briber is frugal in nature. By this, we mean that the briber is only able to influence voters who benefit from the suggestion of the briber. More formally, a voter is vulnera...

Manipulation and bribery have received much attention from the social choice community. We consider these concepts in the setting of preference formalisms, where the Pareto principle is used to assign to preference theories collections of optimal outcomes, rather than a single winning outcome as is common in social choice. We adapt the concepts of manipulation and bribery to this setting. We pr...

As an instrument of corruption control, it has been argued that asymmetric punishment can eliminate harassment bribery if whistle-blowing is cheap and e ective. In a more realistic environment where bribery is most likely to survive and another type of bribery non harassment one coexists, this paper investigates how asymmetric punishment a ects the endogenous choice of bribe type to the bribe-g...

We investigate the computational complexity of finding optimal bribery schemes in voting domains where the candidate set is the Cartesian product of a set of variables and agents’ preferences are represented as CP-nets. We show that, in most cases, the bribery problem is easy. This also holds for some cases of k-approval, where bribery is difficult in traditional domains.

We investigate the role of framing, inequity in initial endowments and history in shaping behavior in a corrupt transaction by extending the one-shot bribery game introduced by Cameron et al. (2009) to a repeated game setting. We find that the use of loaded language significantly reduces the incidence of bribery and increases the level of punishment. Punishment of bribery leads to reduced bribe...

In bribery an external agent tries to alter the outcome of an election by changing some voters’ votes. Usually, when investigating bribery problems, full information is assumed, i.e., that the manipulative agent knows the set of candidates, each voter’s votes and the voting rule used. In this paper, we formally introduce different structures of partial information, we show the connections betwe...

Using survey data collected from senior corporate executives around the world I analyze how detection of bribery impacts firm competitiveness. The data suggest that the most significant impact is on employee morale, followed by business relations and reputation, and then regulatory relations. I find that who initiated the bribery act, how it was detected, and how the firm responded after detect...

We analyze corruption in law enforcement: the payment of bribes to enforcement agents, threats to frame innocent individuals in order to extort money from them, and the actual framing of innocent individuals. Bribery, extortion, and framing reduce deterrence and are thus worth discouraging. Optimal penalties for bribery and framing are maximal, but, surprisingly, extortion should not be sanctio...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of offering rewards for self reports as a means of combating collusive bribery. Rewarding self reporting theoretically sows distrust between parties tempted to exchange bribes and may reduce bribery even where authorities are otherwise ineffective in uncovering corruption. Our results indicate that offering rewards is weakly effective in reducing collus...