Measuring corruption: perception surveys or victimization surveys?

While methodologies and survey techniques recorded progress over the years, corruption measurement remains a many-headed monster. Since 2003 and the first publication of Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer, researchers have access to population's feeling about the corruption scourge across institutions. Thereby, wider room emerged for populations' perceptions in the field of corruption quantification. In this paper, we analyze the gulf separating perceived corruption from experienced bribe situations using global household surveys in a Panel dataset. We show that the gap between these two types of data can be wide and unevenly distributed across countries. Introducing further objective and subjective data we try to puzzle out perception mechanisms.Corruption, Global Corruption Barometer, Governance, CPI, Transparency International, Corruption measurement, Perception indicators, Press freedom, Econometrics, Panel Data, Household surveys.

Measuring corruption: perception surveys or victimization surveys? Towards a better comprehension of populations’ perception mechanisms: press freedom, confidence and gossip

While methodologies and survey techniques recorded progress over the years, corruption measurement remains a many-headed monster. Since 2003 and the first publication of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer, researchers have access to population’s feeling about the corruption scourge across institutions. Thereby, wider room emerged for populations’ perceptions in the field of corruption quantification. In this paper, we analyze the gulf separating perceived corruption from experienced bribe situations using global household surveys in a Panel dataset. We show that the gap between these two types of data can be wide and unevenly distributed across countries. Introducing further objective and subjective data we try to puzzle out perception mechanisms. Bien que les techniques d’enquête et les méthodologies se soient améliorées au fil des années, la mesure corruption demeure problématique. Depuis 2003 et la première publication du Baromètre Mondial de la Corruption par Transparency International, les chercheurs ont dorénavant accès aux perceptions des populations pour évaluer l’étendue de la corruption au sein de différentes administrations. Dans cet article, nous analysons l’écart entre les perceptions de la corruption et l’expérience concrète de celle-ci en utilisant des données de panel issues d’enquêtes ménages menées à une échelle mondiale. Nous comparons ainsi, au sein même des populations, les écarts entre expériences et perceptions de la corruption, afin d’isoler au mieux les mécanismes à l’oeuvre dans la construction des perceptions. Nous montrons alors que les écarts entre ces deux types de donnée peuvent être importants et inégalement distribués.(Full text in english)

Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice: Nine Research Challenges

Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks, or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of problems appearing in this context

The Complexity of Manipulative Attacks in Nearly Single-Peaked Electorates

Many electoral bribery, control, and manipulation problems (which we will refer to in general as "manipulative actions" problems) are NP-hard in the general case. It has recently been noted that many of these problems fall into polynomial time if the electorate is single-peaked (i.e., is polarized along some axis/issue). However, real-world electorates are not truly single-peaked. There are usually some mavericks, and so real-world electorates tend to merely be nearly single-peaked. This paper studies the complexity of manipulative-action algorithms for elections over nearly single-peaked electorates, for various notions of nearness and various election systems. We provide instances where even one maverick jumps the manipulative-action complexity up to \np-hardness, but we also provide many instances where a reasonable number of mavericks can be tolerated without increasing the manipulative-action complexity.Comment: 35 pages, also appears as URCS-TR-2011-96

Swap Bribery

In voting theory, bribery is a form of manipulative behavior in which an external actor (the briber) offers to pay the voters to change their votes in order to get her preferred candidate elected. We investigate a model of bribery where the price of each vote depends on the amount of change that the voter is asked to implement. Specifically, in our model the briber can change a voter's preference list by paying for a sequence of swaps of consecutive candidates. Each swap may have a different price; the price of a bribery is the sum of the prices of all swaps that it involves. We prove complexity results for this model, which we call swap bribery, for a broad class of election systems, including variants of approval and k-approval, Borda, Copeland, and maximin.Comment: 17 page

Globalization and Innovation in Emerging Markets

Globalization brings opportunities and pressures for domestic firms in emerging market economies to innovate and improve their competitive position. Using recent data on firms in 27 transition economies, we test for the effects of globalization through the impact of increased competition and foreign direct investment on domestic firms’ efforts to raise their capability (innovate) by upgrading their technology or their product/service (improving quality or developing a new one), taking into account firm heterogeneity. We find support for the prediction that competition has a negative effect on innovation, especially for firms further from the frontier, and that the supply chain of multinational enterprises and international trade are important channels for domestic firm innovation. We do not find support for the inverted U effect of competition on innovation. There is partial support for the hypothesis that firms in a more pro-business environment invest more in innovation and are more likely to display the inverted U relationship between competition and innovation.competition, innovation, emerging markets, spillovers

Multilateralism cursed by bilateralism: Japan’s Role at the International Whaling Commission

We propose a new categorization of international organizations to account for the fact that within multilateral international organizations, states may engage in “enticement” strategies in order to advance their policy preferences. Thus, to the traditional multilateral/bilateral categorizations we substitute a hard multilateral/soft multilateral and reciprocal bilateral/bilateral taxonomy. For illustration purposes, we use the well-known case study of Japan and the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Using a modified gravity model to analyze Japan’s Official Development Assistance from 1973-2005, we find that Japan has a very traditional – and generous – assistance policy broadly defined, but when it comes to the IWC, some of the general principles driving the aid policy are put aside to possibly influence vote outcomes. Given this finding, we conclude that the IWC is best categorized as a soft multilateral organization.