This paper breaks no new ground: it seeks instead to show that much that is sensible regarding the views and approaches to corruption can be learned from some recent, although apparently scattered, developments in microeconomics. In so doing, the paper hopes to provide a framework within which to fit the various pieces of economic theorizing about corruption that have appeared, including the literature on rent-seeking (Tullock, 1967; Krueger 1984, the literature on regulation and mechanism design (Laffont and Tirole, 1993), the work on transaction costs literature by Williamson (1975), and the literature spawned by Shleifer and Vishny (1993) on the industrial organization of corruption.