Ideally, anti-corruption policies need to be addressed to the fundamental
causes of corruption. However, the analyses above suggest a range of factors
that may influence corruption, while the economic models for dealing
with corruption frequently deal with only a small number of these in, by
necessity, simplified models of actual behaviour. Arguably, strategies to
reduce corruption from the field of economics most heavily rely on, and
are most adept at, understanding motivation, incentive and reward at
the level of the individual. For example, the widely influential efficiency
wage model of corruption is based on the principle of ‘efficient’ wages,
or those that elicit the desired productivity from employees, and suggests
that wages above expected or market levels may yield increased productivity
following evidence from developing countries in the 1950s. This
principle has been developed into several different forms of efficiency
wage model, but the ‘shirking’ model specifically addresses the problems
of employers attempting to overcome principal–agent (abuse of position)
problems when designing compensation packages (Becker & Stigler, 1974;
Shapiro & Stiglitz, 1984).