Abstract
We examine a scenario of social conflict that is manifest during an interaction between government servants providing a service and citizens who are legally entitled to the service, using evolutionary game-theory in structured populations characterized by an inter-dependent network. Bribe-demands by government servants during such transactions, called harassment bribes, constitute a widespread form of corruption in many countries. We investigate the effect of varying bribe demand made by corrupt officials and the cost of complaining incurred by harassed citizens, on the proliferation of corrupt strategies in the population. We also examine how the connectivity of the various constituent networks affects the spread of corrupt officials in the population. We find that incidents of bribery can be considerably reduced in a network-structured populations compared to mixed populations. Interestingly, we also find that an optimal range for the connectivity of nodes in the citizen’s network (signifying the degree of influence a citizen has in affecting the strategy of other citizens in the network) as well as the interaction network aids in the fixation of honest officers. Our results reveal the important role of network structure and connectivity in asymmetric games.
Highlights
We examine a scenario of social conflict that is manifest during an interaction between government servants providing a service and citizens who are legally entitled to the service, using evolutionary game-theory in structured populations characterized by an inter-dependent network
Even though our work focuses on a specific type of social conflict, it provides a general framework for understanding asymmetric games on inter-dependent networks
We explored the effect of network connectivity on the prevalence of bribery in a structured population characterized as an inter-dependent regular network
Summary
We examine a scenario of social conflict that is manifest during an interaction between government servants providing a service and citizens who are legally entitled to the service, using evolutionary game-theory in structured populations characterized by an inter-dependent network. An interaction between a corrupt officer demanding a bribe and a citizen seeking a service provide an ideal example of a social conflict scenario Bribes of this nature, where the citizen is legally entitled to the service sought, are called harassment bribes[1]. The role of anti-social punishment in thwarting the spread of cooperation has been explored[25] though it has been subsequently shown that rewarding of anti-social behaviour by defectors cannot eliminate corruption in spatially structured populations that allow for aggregation of similar strategies provided cooperative behaviour is rewarded[26] It is in the spirit of this rich and diverse literature on crime and punishment that we address the issue of bribery in structured populations. Our results revealed the conditions under which the asymmetric penalty scenario was effective in achieving significant reductions in harassment bribery
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