The Economic Analysis On The Punishment Of Commercial Bribery

As China’s reform and opening up and gradual development of the socialist market economy, China’s economic and social structure has undergone tremendous changes, and commercial bribery increasingly in trading and to spread rapidly to every corner of society, which seriously damaged the fair competition. Having combined with the fact of China’s anti-bribery legislation and enforcement, we will define the commercial bribery in the economic point of view based on the domestic and foreign theoretical research. We believe that the commercial bribery in the perspective of economics should be defined as that the offeror who in order to sell or purchase goods to change the bribery preferences which he should have in transaction in the means of property or others, thereby depriving the opportunity of competitors, or dividing up the interests which should belonged to their company."The bribery preferences which he should have" refers to the bribery preferences should be consistent with the preferences of their company, they should ensure to achieve the maximum benefits for their company in the transaction.To begin with the practice of supervision and punishment of commercial bribery in our nation. We revealed the root causes of commercial bribery and defined a new concept of it. And demonstrated the optimal choice in the process of control commercial bribery from the aspect both supervision and punishment.We believe that the commercial bribery came into being and spread in the condition of monopoly. Especially, the unbalanced supply and demand and information asymmetry bring incentives for business dealers to bribe and take bribes. The participants in the market don’t engage in commercial bribery only because they never want to do that or the cost is greater than benefits. And opportunistic tendencies make us believe that there will be certain behavior as long as the profit will be. So the best way to prevent commercial bribery is to bring a certain deterrent.Supervision and punishment together constitute the deterrent for bribery. The supervision do not bring deterrent directly, it affects the certainty and possibility of the punishment only. However the supervision decided the level of activity of commercial bribery to a large extent. High level of supervision often has low level bribery activity, and inadequate supervision played a key role to a large extent in the fast spreading of commercial bribery. Therefore the government should be strong enough to provide great supervision.However, the power of government is limited in some certain cost constraints. And it still cannot completely eliminate the commercial bribery even if the regulators always monitoring in the best way. It is costly and limited effects to governing only by government with the limited cost and information asymmetry. So we should co-supervision with social forces. While we must find the Equilibrium between supervision and punishment in the cost constraints due to there are different social cost between supervision and punishment.Punishment is the root cause to the deterrent. The punishment can be treated as objects and means. The objects refer to the people who offer bribery called briber and the people who accept bribery called bribe (introducer included sometimes). Although they act together to constitute commercial bribery and the same punishment should be given to them, they play different roles in commercial bribery. And focusing serious punishment on briber seems more conductive to curb commercial bribery in the perspective of supply and demand elasticity if we conduct the bribery as a commodity.In the means of punishment, we have two kinds of ways:fines and imprisonment, and each of them will take some social costs. However, we always prefer to maximize the deterrent function of fines first, and to a certain period of imprisonment as a supplement because the social cost of fines is far less than which of imprisonment.