The assessment of the conflict of interest is crucial for preventing and combating administrative corruption. It is also a critical element in the legitimay of public powers, insofar as conflicts of interest can undermine public confidence in the impartial exercise of public functions.
A characteristic issue in the field of conflict of interest is information asymmetry, to the advantage of the party bearing the deviating interest: the exposure of conflict situations is usually entrusted to the very persons concerned (the only with complete knowledge of the conflict situations), penalised with sanctions (including criminal ones) in the event of false declarations. An effective assessment of the conflict of interest requires to fill this information gap. However, shilling this information gap - precisely because of the different starting conditions - requires a considerable cognitive effort. An economically costly effort, since it requires the mobilisation of (informational and organisational) resources, and legally impervious, since it necessarily involves the processing of personal data.
The research project intends to investigate how the automated processing of large volumes of personal data can alleviate this 'cognitive effort', by bridging the information asymmetry within a reasonable timeframe and at a reasonable cost.
The project relies on two strands of research:
1) the first strand, mainly of a legal nature, will focus on two subjects: the analytical reconstruction of the morphology of the conflict of interest regime; and an in-depth study of the conditions and the limits to the processing of personal data, with reference to the most relevant processing methods/techniques (big data analytics, data mining, machine learning), to the legal basis requirements, to the potential dataset to be processed.
2) the second strand will experiment and test the feasibility of solutions based on the processing of large databases of personal data, to analyse, map and detect the risks of conflicts of interest. The two research strands feed off each other. In vitro experimentation is useful for highlighting risks and shaping solutions in accordance with the principles and institutes of the GDPR legal regime; correlatively, in-depth study on the more strictly legal front is essential for transposing the elementary components of the conflict of interest into mechanisms applicable to automated processing