Commons, anti-commons, corruption and 'maffia' behavior

Alfredo Canavese

Law and Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The particular point that will be stressed in this paper is that benefits derived from corrupt behaviour depend on institutions devised to discourage it. The analytical framework used to explore the symmetric tragedies of the commons and the anticommons outlined by James Buchaman and Yong J. Yoon (2000) is useful to deal with the study of the relationship between institutions and corruption. A simple game theoretic model is built to show that corruption produces a tragedy of the anticommons and it can be discouraged by the introduction of competition among corrupt agents to turn it into a tragedy of the commons. It is also shown that coordinated corruption or 'maffia' behaviour produces a better use of resources than uncoordinated corruption.

Keywords: corruption; crime; maffia behavior; commons; anticommons (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2004-11-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-reg
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/le/papers/0411/0411002.pdf (application/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:wpa:wuwple:0411002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Law and Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).