Controlling Systemic Corruption Through Group Size and Salary Dispersion of Public Servants

We investigate an agent-based model for the emergence of corruption in public contracts. Thereare two types of agents: business people and public servants. Both business people and publicservants can adopt two strategies: corrupt or honest behavior. Interactions between businesspeople and public servants take place through defined payoff rules. Either type of agent can switchbetween corrupt or honest strategies by comparing their payoffs after interacting. We measurethe level of corruption in the system by the fractions of corrupt and honest agents for asymptotictimes. We study the effects of the group size of the interacting agents, the dispersion with respectto the average salary of the public servants, and a parameter representing the institutional controlof corruption. We characterize the fractions of honest and corrupt agents as functions of thesevariables. We construct phase diagrams for the level of corruption in the system in terms of thesevariables, where three collective states can be distinguished: i) a phase where corruption dominates;ii) a phase where corruption remains in less than 50% of the agents; and iii) a phase wherecorruption disappear. Our results indicate that a combination of large group sizes of interactingservants and business people and small dispersion of the salaries of public servants, contributes tothe decrease of systemic corruption in public contracts