Corrupt by Design: How Institutions Create the Problems They Claim to Fight (Unabridged‪)‬

Why do anticorruption campaigns keep failing? Why does corruption survive every reform, every revolution, every new enforcement agency? And why do the countries that punish corruption most harshly often have the most of it?

In Corrupt by Design, Boris Kriger overturns the conventional wisdom that corruption is a problem of bad people in good systems. Drawing on game theory, evolutionary biology, institutional economics, and a formally proved mathematical framework, he argues that corruption is the predictable product of badly designed institutions — a rational response to the gap between what rules demand and what people need. The bribe is not a moral failure. It is a structural symptom.

Through twenty-seven carefully argued chapters, Kriger traces corruption from its origins in prehistoric gift exchange through the rise of formal institutions and into the digital age. He shows why punishment makes corruption more sophisticated rather than less frequent. He reveals how honest officials are systematically displaced by the very systems they serve. He demonstrates why algorithms that cannot be bribed offer the most powerful anticorruption tool ever devised. And he proves — rigorously, mathematically — that the pursuit of absolute institutional purity is not just impractical but actively destructive.

The result is a new way of thinking about one of civilization’s oldest problems: not who is corrupt, but what makes corruption rational — and how to change the answer.

Based on the peer-reviewed paper "Four Principles of Corruption" (Kriger, 2026), included in full as an appendix.