Taxing by Default

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...

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...

Taxing Democracy

What Should Default Reasoning Be, by Default?

This is a position paper concerning the role of empirical studies of human default reasoning in the formalization of AI theories of default reasoning. We note that AI motivates its theoretical enterprise by reference to human skill at default reasoning, but that the actual research does not make any use of this sort of information and instead relies on intuitions of individual investigators. We...

Taxing the Internet

Governments across the globe are facing challenging times to generate more revenue because of the economic slowdown and to balance their budgets. There is a growing need to find new ways of revenue generation as spending cuts and austerity measures don't go well with most sections of the society, especially during difficult economic times. Internet Today is seen more as a necessary commodity an...