Attention Variation and Welfare: Theory and Evidence from a Tax Salience Experiment

Dmitry Taubinsky and Alex Rees-Jones

The Review of Economic Studies, 2018, vol. 85, issue 4, 2462-2496

Abstract: This article shows that accounting for variation in mistakes can be crucial for welfare analysis. Focusing on consumer under-reaction to not-fully-salient sales taxes, we show theoretically that the efficiency costs of taxation are amplified by differences in under-reaction across individuals and across tax rates. To empirically assess the importance of these issues, we implement an online shopping experiment in which 2,998 consumers purchase common household products, facing tax rates that vary in size and salience. We replicate prior findings that, on average, consumers under-react to non-salient sales taxes—consumers in our study react to existing sales taxes as if they were only 25% of their size. However, we find significant individual differences in this under-reaction, and accounting for this heterogeneity increases the efficiency cost of taxation estimates by at least 200%. Tripling existing sales tax rates nearly doubles consumers’ attention to taxes, and accounting for this endogeneity increases efficiency cost estimates by 336%. Our results provide new insights into the mechanisms and determinants of boundedly rational processing of not-fully-salient incentives, and our general approach provides a framework for robust behavioural welfare analysis.

Keywords: Tax salience; Rational inattention; Deadweight loss; Welfare analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 D0 H0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (98)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Attention Variation and Welfare: Theory and Evidence from a Tax Salience Experiment (2016)
Working Paper: Attention Variation and Welfare: Theory and Evidence from a Tax Salience Experiment (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:85:y:2018:i:4:p:2462-2496.

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