Abstract
In a classical social choice framework, this paper presents two formulations of the notion of corruption and examines their consequences for decision making in an organization. It is shown that any organization is corruptible if a minimal concept of corruption is used to diagnose corruptibility; however, if a more demanding concept of corruption is applied, there are organizations that are immune to such stronger forms of corruption. There are no constitutionally incorruptible organizational forms but weakly incorruptible constitutions can exist.
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Notes
See Ostrom (1990).
To focus on our problem at hand, we use a simplest possible framework by assuming that each individual has a strict linear ordering over \(X\).
In the social choice literature, the function \(C\) is often referred to as a social choice function or rule. We use the selection function here to accommodate a wider range of choice problems than the problem implied by a social choice function.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Koichi Tadenuma for helpful conversations, and to Herve Moulin and Prasanta K. Pattanaik for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper. Two anonymous reviewers have given us very helpful comments and suggestions for which we highly appreciate. We are particularly thankful to Reviewer 1 for very detailed and constructive advices on the exposition. Needless to say, all the remaining errors are our own.
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Tang, FF., Xu, Y. Corruption in Organizations: Some General Formulations and (In-)Corruptibility Results. Homo Oecon 38, 49–57 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41412-021-00112-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41412-021-00112-5