 Optimal redistribution with unobservable preferences for an observable merit goodNo 1999009, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Abstract: This paper considers a government that seeks both to redistribute income and to encourage or discourage the consumption of a certain good. This good is assumed to be either a merit or demerit good. Individuals differ in their exogenous income and in their preferences for the merit good. The government can perfectly observe the level of consumption of the merit good. However, it cannot observe neither income nor preferences. The only observable variable is thus each individual's consumption of the merit good. In order to account for merit good considerations, we consider a modification of the utilitarian social welfare function in which the government imposes uniform preferences, despite the heterogeneous individual preferences, at a level which will depend on the merit or demerit nature of the observable good. We derive the optimal nonlinear redistributive policy and compare our results to the ones that would be obtained under a utilitarian social welfare function that respects the own preferences of individual. Keywords: merit goods; non-linear tax schedule. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:1999009 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC. |
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