| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w23980 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 23980 |
| Taxing Humans: Pitfalls of the Mechanism Design Approach and Potential Resolutions | |
| Alex Rees-Jones; Dmitry Taubinsky | |
| 发表日期 | 2017-10-30 |
| 出版年 | 2017 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | A growing body of evidence suggests that psychological biases can lead different implementations of otherwise equivalent tax incentives to result in meaningfully different behaviors. We argue that in the presence of such failures of “implementation invariance,” decoupling the question of optimal feasible allocations from the tax system used to induce them—the “mechanism design approach” to tax analysis—cannot be the right approach to analyzing optimal tax systems. After reviewing the diverse psychologies that lead to failures of implementation invariance, we illustrate our argument by formally deriving three basic lessons that arise in the presence of these biases. First, the mechanism design approach neither estimates nor bounds the welfare computed under psychologically realistic assumptions about individuals' responses to the tax instruments used in practice. Second, the optimal allocations from abstract mechanisms may not be implementable with concrete tax policies, and vice-versa. Third, the integration of these biases may mitigate the importance of information asymmetries, resulting in optimal tax formulas more closely approximated by classical Ramsey results. We conclude by proposing that a “behavioral” extension of the “sufficient statistics” approach is a more fruitful way forward in the presence of such psychological biases. |
| 主题 | Microeconomics ; Behavioral Economics ; Welfare and Collective Choice ; Public Economics ; Taxation |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w23980 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/581654 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Alex Rees-Jones,Dmitry Taubinsky. Taxing Humans: Pitfalls of the Mechanism Design Approach and Potential Resolutions. 2017. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w23980.pdf（418KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
除非特别说明，本系统中所有内容都受版权保护，并保留所有权利。
