Uncovering High-Level Corruption: Cross-National Objective Corruption Risk Indicators Using Public Procurement Data

Competitive procurement with corruption

We study competitive procurement administered by a corrupt agent who is willing to manipulate his evaluation of contract proposals in exchange for bribes. With complete information and no corruption, the efficient firm will win the contract for sure. If the agent is corrupt and has large manipulation power, however, bribery makes it costly for the efficient firm to secure a sure win, so in equi...

Procurement Design with Corruption

This paper investigates the design of optimal procurement mechanisms in the presence of corruption. After the sponsor and the contractor sign the contract, the latter may bribe the inspector to misrepresent quality. Thus, the mechanism affects whether bribery occurs. I show how to include bribery as an additional constraint in the optimal-control problem that the sponsor solves, and characteriz...

Anatomy of grand corruption: A composite corruption risk index based on objective data

Although both the academic and policy communities have attached great importance to measuring corruption, most of the currently available measures are biased and too broad to test theory or guide policy. This article proposes a new composite indicator of grand corruption based on a wide range of elementary indicators. These indicators are derived from a rich qualitative evidence on public procu...

Corruption in public procurement Causes, consequences and cures

Corruption and competition in procurement auctions

We investigate the effect of corruption on competition in procurement. Our assumption is that the bureaucrat (i.e., the agent that administers the market), if corrupt, may provide an opportunity for bid readjusments in exchange for a bribe. As firms expect to be paying a bribe, a mechanical effect of corruption is to increase the contract price by an amount corresponding to the anticipated brib...