You don’t need an invoice, do you? An online experiment on collaborative tax evasion

Lilith Burgstaller and Katharina Pfeil

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2024, vol. 101, issue C

Abstract: Collaborative evasion of taxes and social security fees is prevalent when two parties can coordinate to circumvent third-party reporting mechanisms. Prominent examples are household services when a household hires a service provider and no third party is involved; however, the evidence on the determinants of collaborative tax evasion is scarce. This study examines two coordination mechanisms of collaborative tax evasion: a partner’s signaled intention and information about the majority’s evasion behavior (empirical evasion expectation). We implement an interactive online tax evasion game with 560 participants from an online labor market. Our findings show that manipulating an empirical evasion expectation increases the fraction of evaded transactions by 19 percentage points. Our treatment manipulation of intention signals does not significantly affect evasion; however, when the willingness to evade is signaled first in the chat, the probability of evasion increases by 44 percentage points.

Keywords: Collaborative tax evasion; Social norm; Intention; Online experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D91 E26 H26 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487024000163
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:101:y:2024:i:c:s0167487024000163

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2024.102708

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().