Arguably, for many citizens the perceived expected disutility from sanctions is smaller than the monetary gain from tax evasion. Nevertheless most people pay their taxes most of the time. In a lab experiment, we show that the willingness to pay taxes even absent enforcement is indeed pronounced....

This reports the results of a follow-up experiment conducted to validate an earlier experiment showing that if taxpayers overestimate the prevalence of tax evasion, their compliance can be increased by informing them about the true rate of cheating. Tax compliance, therefore, is influenced...

In this experiment, we test whether the Domar-Musgrave model accurately predicts investor behavior in its paradigmatic setting. Our results indicate that investors only scale up their investments in risky assets to the extent predicted by the model when tax rates are relatively low. Moreover, we...

The aim of the paper was to analyze some behavioral effects, especially the effect of “hidden” tax, the “preference of progressivity” effect and some kind of “preference of short period incidence” effects of citizen. The effects predict the citizens will prefer hidden taxes to direct...

We explore cheating in a die roll task in response to information about tax evasion in a large-scale experiment on a representative sample of the Italian population. We thus generalise laboratory findings on conditional behaviours (cooperation, cheating) to uncover their real-world bearing in...

We show that perceptions of relative rank in the wealth distribution shape individuals' willingness to take risks. Using a representative large-scale survey, we manipulate perceptions of relative standing by randomly varying response categories when asking respondents about their wealth level....

Economic policy decisions often involve a tradeoff between equality and efficiency implemented through income redistribution. We test whether people are more likely to purchase equality with their own money versus transferring someone else’s money to a low-income group member which reduces...

Is people’s willingness to implement their fairness views on a group dependent on how many in the group share their view? We designed a new experiment to answer this question. Spectator participants were asked how many other participants they believe share their view of whether it is fair to...