The Institutionalisation of the Culture of Corruption: Actors’ Games and the Institutional Environment. A Framework for Understanding Systemic Corruption

Human games generate informal institutions, i.e. belief equilibrium (Aoki 2001) that creates constraints which further structure actors’ interactions (North 1993). One important institution of this kind is corruption. Games equilibria represented in the form of corruption are indeed influenced by the characteristics of actual games, but also by the history of players interactions (Aoki 2001, Greif 2006), the linkages of games within the society (Ostrom 2005), and the quality (efficiency) of its general institutional environment encompassing formal and informal, past and present institutions (Ostrom 2005, Greif 2006). Understanding the prevalence of corruption as a “social norm” of behaviors (Platteau 2000) or culture, in other words the values shared within a community (Ostrom 2005), may be possible unless this web of factors is highlighted.