Corruption, Intimidation, and Whistleblowing: A Theory of Inference from Unverifiable Reports

Sylvain Chassang and Gerard i Miquel
Additional contact information
Sylvain Chassang: Princeton University
Gerard i Miquel: London School of Economics

Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Econometric Research Program.

Abstract: We consider a game between a principal, an agent, and a monitor in which the principal would like to rely on messages by the monitor to target intervention against a misbehaving agent. The difficulty is that the agent can credibly threaten to retaliate against likely whistleblowers in the event of an intervention. In this setting intervention policies that are very responsive to the monitor's message provide very informative signals to the agent, allowing him to shut down communication channels. Successful intervention policies must garble the information provided by monitors and cannot be fully responsive. We show that even if hard evidence is unavailable and monitors have heterogeneous incentives to (mis)report, it is possible to establish robust bounds on equilibrium corruption using only non-verifiable reports. Our analysis suggests a simple heuristic to calibrate intervention policies: first get monitors to complain, then scale up enforcement while keeping the information content of intervention constant.

Keywords: corruption; whistleblowing; plausible deniability; inference; structural ex- periment design; prior-free policy design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 D82 D86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://detc.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/ ... rifiable-Reports.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://detc.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp062_2014_Chassang_Miquel_Corruption-Intimidation-and-Whistleblowing-A-Theory-of-Inference-from-Unverifiable-Reports.pdf [302 Found]--> https://detc.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp062_2014_Chassang_Miquel_Corruption-Intimidation-and-Whistleblowing-A-Theory-of-Inference-from-Unverifiable-Reports.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://economics.princeton.edu/the-william-s-dietrich-ii-economic-theory-center/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp062_2014_Chassang_Miquel_Corruption-Intimidation-and-Whistleblowing-A-Theory-of-Inference-from-Unverifiable-Reports.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:metric:062-2014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Econometric Research Program. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().