Department of Physical Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, Mohanpur, 741246, India.
Sci Rep. 2017 Feb 16;7:42735. doi: 10.1038/srep42735.
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.
我们研究了一种社会冲突情景，这种情景在政府服务提供者与合法享有该服务的公民之间的互动中表现出来，使用了具有相互依存网络的结构化群体中的进化博弈论。在这种交易中，政府官员的贿赂要求，即骚扰贿赂，构成了许多国家普遍存在的腐败形式。我们调查了腐败官员提出的贿赂要求和受到骚扰的公民投诉所产生的成本的变化，对人口中腐败策略的扩散的影响。我们还研究了各种组成网络的连接性如何影响腐败官员在人口中的传播。我们发现，与混合人口相比，在网络结构人口中，贿赂事件可以大大减少。有趣的是，我们还发现，公民网络中节点的连接性（表示公民在影响网络中其他公民的策略方面的影响力程度）以及交互网络的最佳范围有助于诚实官员的固定。我们的结果揭示了网络结构和连接性在非对称博弈中的重要作用。
