Taxing and Regulating Vices*

Taxing Bads by Taxing Goods

The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this study are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations, or to members of its Board of Executive Directors or the countries they represent. Taxing bads by taxing goods : pollution control with presumptive charges / Gunnar S. Eskeland, Shantayanan Devaraj...

Word Vices

Taxing Subnetworks

We study taxes in the well-known game theoretic traffic model due to Wardrop. Given a network and a subset of edges, on which we can impose taxes, the problem is to find taxes inducing an equilibrium flow of minimal networkwide latency cost. If all edges are taxable, then marginal cost pricing is known to induce the socially optimal flow for arbitrary multi-commodity networks. In contrast, if o...

The Vices of Argument

What should a virtue theory of argumentation say about fallacious reasoning? If good arguments are virtuous, then fallacies are vicious. Yet fallacies cannot just be identified with vices, since vices are dispositional properties of agents whereas fallacies are types of argument. Rather, if the normativity of good argumentation is explicable in terms of virtues, we should expect the wrongness o...

Taxing Democracy