Benefit sharing: An incentive mechanism for social control of government expenditure

The present paper analyzes the incentives individual members of society face to contribute to a nation's efforts in controlling corruption. A Principal-Agent model is constructed, leading to the following results. First, although individual agents do have an interest in devoting a portion of their resources to the nation's control effort, the opportunity cost of the effort and a free rider problem blocks the spontaneous provision of individual support to corruption control. Second, to cope with those incentives, a new welfare improving mechanism is proposed, which aligns individual incentives with those of society at no extra cost to the government.