Why this book?

Corruption, the misuse of public power for private benefit, turns out to be a relatively new challenge for social sciences. It has been an issue for politics and society for many centuries, but its systematic scientific treatment is rather novel. However, most researchers consider corruption to be just another application of preexisting theories without sufficiently considering their adequacy. This, I believe, is like putting new wine into old wineskins. Just as wine causes the skins to burst corruption ruptures preexisting theories. Just as we lose wine in old skins we may fail to understand corruption without considering its intrinsic dynamics and logic. Applying old theories then falls short of an adequate understanding of the phenomenon.

A lecture that I run on the economics of corruption starts with a game: students are supposed to derive a strategy of how to win a public tender when they have insufficient funding to take the official route. I find myself time and again appalled by the variety of unusual, innovative, and totally criminal proposals. This is what corruption is about: someone violates the rules of the game in a way that was not anticipated by others. To apply models of perfect foresight, rational expectations, competition with a level playing field, and similar models are, hence, no longer enlightening. In this spirit, a variety of orthodox approaches to corruption appear less useful.