Comparing Police Corruption: Bulgaria, Germany, Russia and Singapore by Leslie Holmes

Author:Leslie Holmes [Holmes, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367742706
Google: pkZozgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 57932722
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Game theories

Game theories are formal and based on the assumption that actors mostly behave rationally and make decisions based on logic. The approach can be traced back to an article by John von Neumann published in 1928, though the first full-length elaboration was a book originally published by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944. An early example of game theory is zero-sum games – one person’s gain is another person’s loss. But whereas standard RCT need not involve more than one person, game theory is necessarily interactive between two or more ‘players’. In the words of Florian Diekert (2012: 1776), game theory is ‘the study of rational choice in interactive decision problems’. Two of the best-known ‘games’ in game theory are the prisoner’s dilemma (originally two players, though this has since been expanded: the term was coined by mathematician Albert W. Tucker in the early 1950s – Tucker 1951),4 following the 1950 exposition of the game by Merrill Flood and Melvin Drescher (Mérő 1998: 28: see too Axelrod 1980, 1981; Poundstone 1992) and the tragedy of the commons (multiple players – for details see Hardin 1967; Diekert 2012).

Game theories are seen by some (e.g. Colman 2003) as an advance on RCT, since they are said to allow for ‘common sense’ or common knowledge as well as pure rationality. Others (e.g. Schelling 1960) are more critical of classical game theories for numerous reasons, including internal incoherence (Sensat 1997: 380), their unrealistic assumptions about both rationality and the amount of knowledge actors have, and for oversimplifying the complexity of the human mind (Sadedin 2015). Another major criticism is that they are too abstract – the world, as well as the human mind, is messier and less logical than they imply.

Nevertheless, game theory has been used to explain corruption in various contexts (e.g. Macrae 1982; Friehe 2008; Úbeda and Duéñez-Guzmán 2011). Suzanne Sadedin (2015) has applied it specifically to police corruption. For her, a game is ‘a stylised scenario in which each player receives a pay-off determined by the strategies chosen by all players’. She provides a neat explanation of the prisoner’s dilemma and shows how, in that game, the maxim ‘always act like an untrusting jerk’ is the most reliable strategy. However, she also shows how there are many examples from nature – including the most frequent form of human behaviour – that reveal that ‘biological niceness’ (i.e. an innate tendency to help or cooperate with others) is more common than the individual’s continuous pursuit of self-interest. She also refers to the work of Francisco Úbeda and Edgar Duéñez-Guzmán (2011) whose game-theoretical approach reaches depressing conclusions on the possibilities of reducing corruption among those meant to police society. She decided to collaborate with one of the authors (Duéñez-Guzmán) to see if there was any possibility of a more encouraging scenario. They did find one – but it is one that is, sadly, unrealistic: their solution was to abandon the distinction between the police and the public, and make everybody responsible for policing.

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