This paper presents, to our knowledge, the first empirical investigation if tax evasion might be desirable for an optimal income tax schedule. More specifically: Does the opportunity to evade taxes eventually even increase tax revenues? Resuscitating the intriguing conclusions by the theoretical...

Empirical literature on preferences for wealth taxation almost exclusively focuses on either the emotionally loaded estate tax or rather general concepts of redistributive preferences. Yet, it remains unclear whether the exceptional opposition towards the estate tax is applicable to other...

The individual capacity to form personal preferences constitutes an essential element of the democratic process. At the same time, policies with far-reaching consequences often require profound expertise. Taxation is such an example. Due to its complex character, bounded rationality might induce...

Empirical literature on preferences for wealth taxation almost exclusively focuses on either the emotionally loaded estate tax or rather general concepts of redistributive preferences. Yet, it remains unclear whether the exceptional opposition towards the estate tax is applicable to other...

Although theoretical research on optimal capital taxation suggest to incorporate public opinions, the empirical literature on preferences regarding capital taxation almost exclusively focusses on the emotionally loaded estate tax. This paper presents a more comprehensive investigation of...

In this paper we use an experiment to compare a theory of risk aversion and a theory of spite as an explanation for overbidding in auctions. As a workhorse we use the second-price all-pay and the first-price winner-pay auction. Both risk and spite can be used to rationalize deviations from risk...

We study how the powerful perceive power abuse, and how negative experience related to it influences the appropriateness judgments of the powerless. We create an environment conducive to unfair exploitation in a repeated Public Goods game where one player (punisher) is given a further ability to...

We study how punishment influences conditional cooperation. We ask two questions: 1) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject can be punished and 2) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject has the power to punish others. In particular, we disentangle the decision to be a...

This paper studies how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by agents motivated by spiteful preferences under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. We conduct an experiment and find that litigation expenditures and settlement requests are higher for more spiteful...

Does political polarization lead to dysfunctional behavior? To study this question, we investigate the attitudes of supporters of Donald Trump and of Hillary Clinton towards each other and how these attitudes affect spiteful behavior. We find that both Trump and Clinton supporters display less...