Inconsistency and bias in thinking about tax reform

思维中的各种谬误干扰了对税收问题的判断。特别是，人们可能会反对或不一致地支持优化改革-或者支持不太理想的改革-因为三组认知偏差。其一，现状效应导致人们抵制有益的变化：他们往往会更多地权衡感知到的损失，而不是放弃的收益。第二，对比较点的操纵，影响了人们对改革方案利弊的看法。第三，人们低估了财政政策中各种“看不见”的因素，比如估算的收入，以及各种税收和转移项目的激励效应或机会成本。我们将在一系列实验中探索这些效应，一些实验是在万维网上进行的，另一些实验是用其他样本进行的。我们将在一系列现实的税制改革建议中考察这些影响，例如，涉及对已婚夫妇征税、隐藏税、工资税、消费税、估算所得税、污染税以及替代私人支出的税收(如支付医疗保健费用的税种)。最后，我们将尝试“消除”利益的影响，并探索将培训从一个领域转移到另一个领域(部分通过使用已经接受过税收经济理论培训的人的样本)。

Various fallacies in thinking interfere with judgment aboutmatters of tax. In particular, people may oppose orinconsistently support optimizing reforms --- or favor reformsthat are less than optimal --- because of three clusters ofcognitive biases. One, the status-quo effect, leads people toresist beneficial change: they are apt to weigh perceived lossesmore than foregone gains. Two, manipulation of the point ofcomparison affects how people perceive the advantages anddisadvantages of reform proposals. Three, people underestimate orignore various "unseen" elements of fiscal policy, such asimputed income and the incentive effects or opportunity costs ofvarious tax and transfer programs.We shall explore these effects in a series of experiments, someconducted on the World Wide Web and others conducted with othersamples. We shall examine these effects in a wide range ofrealistic tax reform proposals, e.g., those concerned with taxeson married couples, hidden taxes, payroll taxes, consumptiontaxes, taxes on imputed income, pollution taxes, and taxes thatsubstitute for private expenditures (such as those that pay forhealth care). Finally, we shall attempt to "debias" the effectsof interest, and explore the transfer of training from one domainto another (in part by using samples of people who have alreadybeen trained in the economic theory of taxes).