Social structure bureaucracy and corruptionA

Using the principal-agent- supervisor paradigm, this paper examines the occurrence of collusion in a setting where the principal has no information about the supervisor and the agent does not necessarily know the supervisor’s preferences. We formally prove the occurrence of collusion is more likely when the agent has information about the preferences of the supervisor. This result suggests that corruption, which is likely to emerge in long term social reciprocal relationships between public officials and potential bribery may be reduced by the means of bureaucratic staff rotation. Evidence from an experimental study supports this proposition and our theoretical finding.