Purpose

Oil is the natural resource recognized as the most important source of revenue in oil-dependent countries and is most often referred to as being susceptible to corruption owing to its strategic importance. A major challenge in addressing and encountering the problems in complex social systems, such as corruption, is how to structure the problematic situation and how to capture mental models of the stakeholders involved in the situation, and also how to identify the system’s behavior in response to various policy intervention attempts in the long run. This study aims to shed new lights on modeling and simulating corrupt system of the oil industry, as a complex social system needed to be structured according to social system theories’ principles.

Design/methodology/approach

Parson’s theory is applied as a basic framework to capture the complexities of a corrupt system, dividing the system into political and structural, economic, legal and judicial and cultural and social sub-systems. Then soft system dynamics methodology, which is a combination of the two well-known methodologies, soft system methodology and system dynamics, is applied to model and simulate the complexities involved in the oil industry of Iran, which owns the second-largest oil reservoir in the world and its economy is much dependent on the oil revenue, struggles with corruption, and plans for a large amount of anti-corruption activities.

Findings

After simulating and calibrating the model, three groups of policies, namely, “reducing corruption opportunities,” “reducing corruption demand,” and “increasing anti-corruption capacity” are implemented in the model. As to the simulation results, due to the mutual inter-causality of opportunity and demand for corruption, individual application of each group of policies will not be helpful for long, rather a combination of policies will conduce to substantial improvements in declining corruption in the oil industry.

Originality/value

The developed model addresses the dynamics of the complex socio-economic system of corruption in the system of oil industry via modeling and simulation. The developed four-dimension system dynamics framework could be considered as a guidance for corruption modeling in general and as a basic model for corruption modeling of oil-dependent countries’ systems in particular.

中文翻译：

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应用软系统动力学方法（SSDM）对伊朗石油工业腐败的复杂性管理

目的

石油是被认为是依赖石油的国家最重要的收入来源的自然资源，并且由于其战略重要性，最常被称为易受腐败影响。解决和遇到复杂社会系统中的问题（如腐败）的一个主要挑战是如何构建问题情境，如何捕捉参与情境的利益相关者的心理模型，以及如何识别系统的行为以应对腐败。长期的各种政策干预尝试。本研究旨在为石油工业腐败系统的建模和模拟提供新的思路，因为石油工业是一个复杂的社会系统，需要根据社会系统理论的原则进行构建。

设计/方法/方法

帕森的理论被用作捕捉腐败系统复杂性的基本框架，将系统分为政治和结构、经济、法律和司法以及文化和社会子系统。然后，软系统动力学方法是软系统方法论和系统动力学这两种众所周知的方法的结合，被应用于建模和模拟伊朗石油工业所涉及的复杂性，伊朗拥有世界上第二大油藏。世界及其经济在很大程度上依赖于石油收入，与腐败作斗争，并计划进行大量反腐败活动。

发现

在对模型进行模拟和校准后，模型中实施了“减少腐败机会”、“减少腐败需求”和“提高反腐败能力”三组政策。从模拟结果来看，由于腐败的机会和需求之间存在相互因果关系，单独应用每组政策不会长久，相反，政策组合将有助于大幅改善石油腐败现象的减少。行业。

原创性/价值

开发的模型通过建模和模拟来解决石油工业系统中复杂的社会经济腐败系统的动态。开发的四维系统动力学框架可以被视为一般腐败建模的指南，特别是石油依赖国家系统腐败建模的基本模型。