Ariane Lambert-Mogiliansky Delivered a Report on 'Social Accountability to Contain Corruption'

On March 24 a research seminar on political economy took place at HSE.

Ariane Lambert-Mogiliansky (PSE Paris School of Economics) spoke on 'Social Accountability to Contain Corruption'.

Abstract: 

In this paper we investigate the welfare properties of simple rules for reappointment aimed at holding a public official accountable and monitor his activity. The public official allocates budget resources to various activities which results in the delivery of public services to citizens. He has discretion over the use of resource so he can divert some of them for private ends. Because of a liability constraint, zero diversion can never be secured in all states. The optimal reappointment mechanism under complete information is shown to exhibit some leniency. Under asymmetric information (about the state), a rule with random verification in a pre-announced subset is shown to be optimal in a class of common rules. Surprisingly, those common rules make little use of hard information about service delivery when available. In contrast requesting that the PO defends his records publicly can be very useful if the service users can refute false claims with cheap talk complaints: the first best complete information outcome can be approached in the absence of any observation by the manager of the accountability mechanism.