Bribery Meets Its Match: Technology, Regulation Combat Corruption

A London-based boutique investment bank—let’s call it Diamond Capital, in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee—agrees to invest in an infrastructure venture building a hydroelectric power plant and dam in a frontier market country. Relatively stable politically, the country nevertheless witnesses intermittent regionalized ethnic strife—and the project is to be built in one such region, where tribal leaders are known to threaten violence unless they are sufficiently bribed.

The project’s other