Strategic location of firms: Does it empower bribe givers or bribe takers?

This paper uses survey data on the corruption experience (rather than corruption perceptions) of firms located in different types of cities in more than one hundred countries to analyze the impact of firms’ strategic location on corruption. In a corrupt economy, location might influence the ability of bureaucrats/politicians and firms to extract and dodge rents. Placing the analysis in the literature on determinants of corruption, our results reveal that the corruption experiences of firms located in nations’ capital cities are qualitatively different from firms located elsewhere: they do not experience greater corruption, while firms in large cities and main business cities do. However, when manufacturing and service firms are considered separately, their corruption experience and perceptions differ.     

Optimal Contracts for Long-Term Decisions and the Threat of Dismissal

This paper studies a simple agency model where an agent's decision can affect his or her own future payoffs as well as the principal's. The threat of dismissal becomes an important part of an incentive scheme even if the principal can use the performance-based wage contract. However, if the agent's future payoffs depend on the past realized performance, but not on the past decision directly, or if the agent is risk-neutral, it is not optimal to use the threat of dismissal. As the agent's discretion over his future payoffs increases, the principal relies more on the threat of dismissal but less on the wage contract.     

Detection of collusion in government procurement auctions

Research on bidder collusion in procurement auctions is reasonably successful in unveiling the mechanisms of collusion among the bidders. But it is relatively weak in forwarding effective practical methods of collusion detection before the winner is declared, because they presuppose the knowledge of collusion in specific auctions. Past studies, however, point out the need for working with bid price-to-reserve price ratios rather than bid prices or winning bid prices, to be free from the problem of heteroscedasticity. They also draw an important inference that the set of collusive data are significantly different from the set of competitive data. On the basis of these basic facts, the current paper outlines a seven-step approach to collusion detection. The approach makes rudimentary statistical analysis of bid price-to-reserve price ratios for all the bidders. The analysis comprises tests of equality of means, medians and variance and tests of skewness, autocorrelation and normality of the ratios. It divides the ratios into two significantly different clusters. The cluster with the higher mean and variance values of the ratios corresponds to collusive bidding with the other cluster corresponding to competitive bidding. The paper proposes the construction of a process control chart to detect occurrence of collusion in an auction immediately after the price bids are opened. The approach is illustrated by applying it to data from procurement auctions for construction projects in a State Department of the Republic of India.     

西部公共资源招标拍卖监管的规制

加入WTO与西部大开发的深入使西部公共资源招标拍卖监管的改革不可避免.面对维护民族经济利益与兼顾WTO规则、"超国民待遇"和"非国民待遇"并存、程序不规范、土地规划科学性不足和腐败滋生等监管中的问题,提出以政府职能转型为监管更新契机,以土地资本和地域空间为监管核心,以城市管理为监管重点,以遏制腐败行为为监管保障.     

论几种特殊合同中的要约与承诺

文章指出,在招投标形式订立合同的过程中,招标属于合同上的要约邀请,投标为要约,定标是承诺,但招标属于必须经过的阶段,投标的撤回随意性比较大,定标采取投邮生效主义。在拍卖订立合同的过程中,各行为的性质视增价拍卖和减价拍卖而有所不同。增价拍卖也会因为有底价拍卖和无底价拍卖的区别而导致行为性质的差异。招股说明书的要式特征,使其虽然不满足要约的条件,但法定成为了要约,而且不可撤回和撤销。     

Corruption in dictatorships

In this paper, we consider a simple model capable of explaining why some dictatorships choose to extract rents via seemingly inefficient institutions. In particular, this paper focuses on institutions associated with high levels of corruption and examines the conditions under which such institutions could serve the interests of a dictatorship. Developing such a model requires that we pose alternative institutions that dictators can choose to extract rents. Using this framework, this paper builds a model providing a theoretical basis for some stylized facts about the observed crosscountry variation in corruption levels. Specifically, the model motivates a rationale for the finding that higher levels of corruption are observed in countries characterized as having more heterogeneous populations, longer expected dictator tenure, and more severe punishment norms. The model is then estimated using international country level data.     

线性合同招标中投标人数的博弈模型研究

在线性合同的假设前提下，论文通过建立模型，求解博弈的贝叶斯均衡得到了风险中性的理性招标人的最优合同形式以及投标人的最优报价策略。最后，论文通过引入招标成本函数，进一步提出了对于招标人控制投标人数从而达到自身目标最优的策略。     

Optimal decisions in foreign exchange bidding markets

I characterize optimal bidding decisions in bidding markets where each agent does not perceive she can significantly affect the market outcome. Using a foreign exchange bidding framework to provide a micro-foundation for the shape of a bidder's payoff function, I show that (1) in a discriminatory auction a bidder bids for a price that equals the value of the marginal product of her bid quantity, and (2) in a competitive auction a bidder bids for a price that equals the value of the average product of her bid quantity. An example illustrates the comparative properties of these solutions.     

Exports and cross-national corruption: A disaggregated examination

This paper empirically examines the relation between categories of exports and corruption across countries. Aggregate exports and agricultural exports tend to decrease corruption, while fuel exports increase corruption. The influence of agricultural exports in more pronounced in more corrupt nations, while fuel exports contribute to corruption in least corrupt nations. Manufacturing and ore exports, on the other hand, generally fail to show significant impacts on corruption. Our findings demonstrate that the resource curse is sensitive to prevailing corruption levels, and this finding is novel in the literature. Consistent with the extant literature, corruption decreases with income, and (at some corruption levels) as political freedom increases, and with larger government size. The findings are fairly robust to an alternate corruption measure.     

Electricity Auctions

This article examines auctions in the electricity industry. We find that the laws of physics that rule power transmission networks defeat ex post productive efficiency: the cheapest combination of generating plants is not always selected, not even in the optimal auction. Furthermore, neither the pay-your-bid nor the uniform-price auction coincides in general with the optimal auction, nor do they yield productive efficiency. Our analysis also sheds light on behavior observed in existing power markets, and leads to policy recommendations. First, producers protected by transmission constraints must see their bids capped in the short run to curb their ability to extract large rents. Second, producers apparently hurt by the unavailability of transmission capacity may benefit from it. Hence, contrary to common wisdom, policy makers cannot rely on them to finance or advocate transmission expansion.     

Bidder collusion at first-price auctions

We show that in simple environments, a bidding ring operating at a first-price sealed-bid auction cannot achieve any gains relative to non-cooperative bidding if the ring is unable to control the bids that its members submit at the auction. This contrasts with results for the case in which the ring can control its members’ bids or prevent all but one of the ring members from participating in the auction. Numerical examples suggest that this result extends to some more complex environments. The analytic results use linear programming techniques that have potential applications to a number of other economic problems.     

有效进行招投标报价分析

随着我国经济建设的发展,建筑市场的规范、有序化管理已经逐步形成,其中招投标制度在工程承发包交易行为公开、公平、提高工程质量、发挥投资效益、防止腐败和不正当竞争等方面均起到了很好的促进作用。本文根据现行的主要招投标评标方法,分析基于博弈论建立与之相适应的投标博弈模型的方法,为施工企业投标的科学决策提供借鉴。     

On the strictly descending multi-unit auction

We analyze the bidding behavior in a strictly descending multi-unit auction where the price decreases continuously without going back to the initial start price once an object is sold. We prove that any equilibrium in the multi-unit descending auction is inefficient. We derive a symmetric equilibrium for general distribution functions as well as an arbitrary number of bidders and objects. Moreover, equilibrium bidding is characterized by a set of initial value problems. Our analysis thus generalizes previous results in the literature.     

多单位网上拍卖中的托投标分析

在独立私有价值的多单位网上英式拍卖中，诚实的竞标者能够采用对抗性的竞标策略来降低卖者参与托投标的激励，然而即使考虑了诚实竞标者对于托投标的策略性响应，托投标对于卖者而言依然是有利可图的。更为有效地阻止托投标的措施可能包括吸引更多的潜在竞标者，并限制在单次拍卖中销售的物品数量。同时考虑了卖者对于这种对抗性竞标策略的策略响应，求解了卖者的最优托投标，结论表明无论最优的托投标是唯一的还是多重的，卖者的最优策略是在开始使用低的托投标，在观察到之前的竞标信息之后通过动态调整将托投标设定到最优水平。     

Is privatization related to corruption? An empirical analysis of European countries

This study analyses the relationship between privatization and corruption in Europe over the period 1995 to 2013, taking into account the problems surrounding the issue of causality. There have been researches into the role of privatization in reducing corruption, but decisions about privatization itself are made by politicians, and so corruption could also affect decision making about privatizations. The empirical findings suggest that perceived corruption decreases as the number of privatization transactions increases, but the effect is contrary when privatizations are a more important in terms of annual revenues. Furthermore, our results indicate that overall, privatizations carried out since the early 1980s have not been effective in reducing corruption in Europe. Indeed, privatizations reforms are more carried out in the less corrupt countries.     

Wars of attrition and all-pay auctions with stochastic competition

We extend the war of attrition and all-pay auction analysis of Krishna and Morgan (1997) to a stochastic competition setting. We determine the existence of equilibrium bidding strategies and discuss the potential shape of these strategies. Results for the war of attrition contrast with the characterization of the bidding equilibrium strategies in the first-price all-pay auction as well as the winner-pay auctions. Furthermore we investigate the expected revenue comparisons among the war of attrition, the all-pay auction and the winner-pay auctions and discuss the linkage principle as well. Our findings are applicable to future works on contests and charity auctions.     

Corruption and auctions

We investigate how corruption affects the outcome of a first-price auction (bidding behavior, efficiency and the seller’s expected revenue). The auctioneer approaches the winner to offer the possibility of a reduction in his bid in exchange for a bribe. The bribe can be a percentage of the difference between the winning and the second-highest bid or a fixed amount. We show that there exists a symmetric bidding strategy equilibrium that is monotone, i.e., higher valuation buyers bid higher. Corruption does not affect efficiency but both the auctioneer’s expected bribe and the seller’s expected revenue depend on the format of the bribe payments. We also find the optimal bribe scheme.     

Aspects of complexity in citizen–bureaucrat corruption: an agent-based simulation model

In this paper, the complexity-based approach is used to analyse corruption and its internal economics and dynamics. To better understand the drivers of corruption, we employ an agent-based model with heterogeneous agents (bureaucrats and citizens), the interactions of which determine the level of corruption in a society. The emergence of a prevailing social norm of corruption is shown to be significantly influenced by the initial conditions (i.e., history and habits). A cost analysis demonstrates that a relatively limited financial investment is required for the phase transition from the corrupt to the non-corrupt state. The concept of opportunity costs is used to express the value of information shared within an agent’s social group that improves agent decision-making. Incomplete information and uncertainty in the legal system help to reduce corruption by promoting a fear of engaging in corruption in a society. The results of this research may offer useful insights for informing an effective anti-corruption policy.

     

The effect of corruption on environmental performance: Does spatial dependence play a role?

Different from previous studies that mainly focused on conventional estimation techniques, this paper explores the role of spatial dependence in the effect of corruption on environmental performance by using a spatial panel data model. Our results show that the direct effects, indirect effects and total effects of corruption on environmental performance are negative and highly significant, implying that corruption is detrimental to environmental performance. More importantly, we find that there is a significant spatial spillover effect between corruption and environmental performance, namely being surrounded by highly corrupt countries has a negative impact on the local country’s environmental performance. Our results also suggest that a larger population density will worsen the environment, while urbanization has a significant positive impact. These results provide some important implications for policymakers seeking to improve their environmental performance.     

Measures of corruption and determinants of US corruption

This paper contributes to the literature by examining whether conclusions from empirical models of corruption determinants are robust with respect to three alternative measures of corrupt activity for the US states. Are the determinants of US corruption sensitive to the choice of the measure of corruption? Overall, the answer to this question is that the choice of the measure of corruption matters in explaining corruption. However, some findings are robust across measures. For instance, greater educational attainment lowers corruption, while greater judicial employment adds to corruption. Southern states were found to be more corrupt, ceteris paribus. We also provide evidence that it is important to control for enforcement efforts in empirical modeling using convictions as a measure of corruption. Significant differences, however, across corruption measures occur in a number of other instances. Specifically, the effects of urbanization, economic prosperity, population size, media, government spending, and enforcement are sensitive to the measure of corruption. Further, the influences of the nation’s foreign neighbors and of the location of the state relative to the nation’s capital remain unclear.