We build a simple model to capture the major virtues and drawbacks of making public officials accountable (i.e., subjecting them to reelection): On the one hand, accountablity allows the public to screen and discipline their officials; on the other, it may induce those officials to pander to public opinion and put too little weight on minority welfare. We study when decision-making powers shoul...

The influence of wages on public officials’ corruptibility: a laboratory investigation by Roel van Veldhuizen* Previous studies have proposed a link between corruption and wages in the public sector. The present paper investigates this link using a laboratory experiment. In the experiment, public officials have the opportunity to accept a bribe and can then decide between a neutral and a corrup...

bribery is one of the most important instances of corruption offenses. united nations convention against corruption considered bribery of national public officials as the first instance, and called on state parties to establish it as criminal offense in their domestic laws. this offense considered as an offense against public tranquility makes the public lose its trust to government and public ...

We build a principal-agent-client model of corruption, allowing for heterogeneity of the value of public projects relative to the cost of monitoring their virtuous execution. In an environment in which potential corruptors face uncertainty about the type of project followed by officials, we show under which conditions officials with low-value projects have an incentive to signal their project’s...

The Internet provides a new digital opportunity for realizing democracy in public administration, and this study raises a central question: What factors determine public officials’ acceptance of the practice of digital democracy on government Web sites? We focused on online policy forums among many practices of digital democracy. To gauge public officials’ behavioral intentions to use online po...