Monitoring Corruption and Overcoming the Collective Action Problem: A Unified Model

Presented at French Evolutionary Society for Human Sciences Annual Conference (with Torben Behmer).

Principal-agent and collective-action theories anchor the two most common approaches to corruption, but scholars often treat them as competing explanations. We integrate principal-agent, collective-action, and functionalist insights by embedding monitoring into a multiple-equilibria, collective-action model of citizen behavior. It captures the limits of top-down supervision under systemic corruption, while shifting collective-action accounts from high-level equilibria toward citizen-level beliefs and payoffs. The model does so by disaggregating citizen-level monitoring benefits into collective and private types. Beyond identifying the relevant equilibria, we show how their selection and stability depend on citizens’ beliefs about strategic reasoning and others’ willingness to take action against corruption. Our model enables collective-action accounts of corruption to explain incremental change and heterogeneous outcomes within countries or societies. The distinction between collective and private monitoring benefits also provides a heuristic to guide policy. [Draft Paper]