APPLICATION OF SEMIGROUP THEORY IN MODELING AND MITIGATING CORRUPTION IN GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT

Abstract

Government procurement is among the most corruption – prone functions of governance, with major risks including favoritism, bid-rigging, specification manipulation, collusion among bidders, and monitoring failures. Traditional approaches such as game theory, network analysis, dynamic models have offered insights, but often treat corruption acts or agents in isolation or via probalistic transitions, rather than formally modeling how corrupt acts enable or reinforce one another structurally. This paper presents a novel algebraic framework based on semigroup theory to model government procurement corruption. In this work, acts or states of corruption constitute a semigroup, with the binary operation modeling the enabling of corrupt acts or conditions and key algebraic features are mapped to procurement corruption phenomena. This interdisciplinary study offers a novel algebraic perspective to compliment existing political and economic models of corruption.