Where to place your bribe...

The Biggest Bang for Your Bribe, By Richard Morin, WaPo It's tough being corrupt. You know you probably need to bribe lots of people to achieve your ignoble goals. But where, exactly, do you put your money? Do you invest more heavily in payoffs to politicians, to the police or to judges? Or would it be more effective to bribe the news media to ignore scandals and produce monotonously favorable coverage?

The answer is to invest in the news media, claim economist John McMillan of the Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and graduate student Pablo Zoido in a paper to be published in the fall by the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

They based their conclusion on a detailed study of an unusual data set: Records of bribes kept by Vladimiro Montesinos, the former head of Peru's secret service. Montesinos's goal was to protect his patron, then-President Alberto Fujimori....