R egulated products such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), plant protection products (PPPs) or feed additives for livestock are subject to an environmental risk assessment before they can be approved for use in agriculture. This assessment aims to evaluate any possible risk that the deployment of such products may pose to the environment. Robust environmental risk assessments require an...

Risk assessments performed at the conceptual design phase of a product may offer the greatest opportunity to increase product safety and reliability at the least cost. This is an especially difficult proposition, however, as often the product has not assumed a physical form at this early design stage. This paper introduces the Risk in Early Design (RED) method, a method for performing risk asse...

a n wa r s h a h 7 A lthough statistics on corruption are often questionable, the data suggest that corruption accounts for a significant proportion of economic activity. In Kenya " questionable " public expenditures noted by the controller and auditor general in 1997 amounted to 7.6 percent of GDP. In Latvia a recent World Bank survey found that more than 40 percent of households and enterpris...

Why is corruption—the misuse of public office for private gain— perceived to be more widespread in some countries than others? Different theories associate this with particular historical and cultural traditions, levels of economic development, political institutions, and government policies. This article analyzes several indexes of “perceived corruption” compiled from business risk surveys for...

We present a dynamic network model of corrupt and noncorrupt employees representing two states in the public and private sector. Corrupt employees are more connected to one another and are less willing to change their attitudes regarding corruption than noncorrupt employees. This behavior enables them to prevail and become the majority in the workforce through a first-order phase transition eve...

The paper explores a game-theoretic model of petty corruption involving a sequence of entrepreneurs and a track of bureaucrats. Each entrepreneur’s project is approved if and only if it is cleared by each bureaucrat. The project value is stochastic; its value is observed only by the entrepreneur, but its distribution is common knowledge. Each bureaucrat clears the project only if a bribe is pai...

For our experiment on corruption, we designed a coordination game to model the influence of risk attitudes, beliefs, and information on behavioral choices and determined the equilibria. We observed that the participants’ risk attitudes failed to explain their choices between corrupt and non-corrupt behavior. Instead, beliefs appeared to be a better predictor of whether or not they would opt for...