Tax evasion in a behaviorally heterogeneous society: An evolutionary analysis ¬リニ

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Behavioral heterogeneity Cheating Evolutionary game theory Peer punishment Public goods game Tax morale We focus on the tax evasion dynamics emerging from repeated interaction of three types of taxpayers: cheaters, honest citizens and punishers. By assuming that cultural evolution is driven by material payoffs only, we show that a long overlooked behavioral attitude towards taxation such as tax morale is important to dynamically induce higher levels of tax compliance within a large-scale population. The results of our evolutionary analysis reveal that the presence of taxpayers who both act honestly in the first place and are willing to costly sanction cheaters plays an important role for the long-run success of the social battle against tax evasion. In the last four decades, tax compliance has been extensively investigated in economics and also gradually evolved into a major research topic in economic psychology. Since the seminal papers of Allingham and Sandmo (1972) and Srinivasan (1973), the standard approach to income tax evasion models the decision process of tax compliance relying on two key assumptions: (1) a representative taxpayer is considered and (2) the taxpayer is a personal income maximizer, i.e. he is exclusively concerned about his own material utility. Over the years, the model has been expanded in many directions (see Kirchler et al., 2007, and the recent comprehensive survey by Pickardt and Prinz, 2014), but few variants of it relax either of these two assumptions. In line with recent work in the area, we claim that the major problem with the standard economic approach to tax compliance is that it is too narrow for a comprehensive explanation of compliance behavior (Kirchler, 2007). In particular, available empirical evidence does not support neither (1) nor (2). Hence, in this article, we purposely take a different route and depart from both assumptions. As to the first one, empirical evidence indicates that a significant degree of behavioral heterogeneity exists among taxpayers. While some citizens are inherently honest and would not evade even if they had the concrete opportunity of doing it, others are not and tend to systematically free ride on others' willingness to comply (see e.g. Section 2 in this paper). Laboratory data from both tax compliance studies and other settings complement field evidence and convey a similar message: different stable types exist, suggesting that people, far from quickly reacting to changes in …