Public beliefs and corruption in a repeated psychological game

Loukas Balafoutas

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of guilt aversion for corruption in public administration. Corruption is modeled as the outcome of a game played between a bureaucrat, a lobby, and the public. There is a moral cost of corruption for the bureaucrat, who is averse to letting the public down. We study how the behavior of the lobby and the bureaucrat depend on perceived public beliefs, when these are constant and when they are allowed to vary over time. With time-varying beliefs, corruption is more likely when the horizon of the game is relatively long and when public beliefs are initially low and are updated fast.

Keywords: psychological games; corruption; bureaucracy; guilt; third party (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2009-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2009-01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Public beliefs and corruption in a repeated psychological game (2011)
Journal Article: Public beliefs and corruption in a repeated psychological game (2011)
Working Paper: Public beliefs and corruption in a repeated psychological game (2011)
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:inn:wpaper:2009-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Judith Courian ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).