A large and growing literature shows that decision-makers are more likely to select options presented to them as the default. We study the optimal choice of defaults. Our model assumes that decision-makers behave as if there is some cost to selecting any option that is not the default. These...

We consider the optimal policy problem of a benevolent planner, who is uncertain about an individual's true preferences because of inconsistencies in revealed preferences across behavioral frames. We adapt theories of expected utility maximization and ambiguity aversion to characterize the...

What determines the efficiency cost of taxation in the presence of optimization errors? Employing recent results quantifying efficiency cost when consumers are subject to biases, this paper shows how budget adjustment rules, debiasing, and the nature of tax perception affect efficiency cost....

How quickly does marginal utility diminish? It depends on the dimension along which we consider concavity of the utility function. This paper estimates the distribution of heterogeneous curvature parameters in individuals' utility functions from hypothetical choice data, while carefully...

A spate of new research suggests that the salience of a tax dramatically shapes taxpayer behavior: the more salient a tax — i.e., the more prominent a good's after-tax price — the more taxpayers respond. Policymakers make decisions about tax salience, whether they intend to or not, every...

Recent empirical work finds that consumers under-account for commodity taxes when the after-tax price is not prominent. I investigate how policymakers may utilize such “low-salience” taxes to promote welfare. The optimal combination of high- and low-salience taxes balances two competing...