Attention Variation and Welfare: Theory and Evidence from a Tax Salience Experiment
中文摘要
本文表明，考虑错误的变异对于福利分析可能至关重要。聚焦于消费者对非完全显著的销售税反应不足，我们从理论上表明，税收的效率成本会因个体之间以及税率之间的反应不足差异而被放大。为了实证评估这些问题的重要性，我们实施了一项在线购物实验，2,998名消费者在其中购买常见家庭用品，所面临的税率在规模和显著性上各不相同。我们印证了先前的发现，即平均而言，消费者对非显著销售税反应不足——我们研究中的消费者对现行销售税的反应，仿佛其税率仅为其实际水平的25%。然而，我们发现这种反应不足存在显著的个体差异，考虑这一异质性会使税收效率成本的估计值至少增加200%。将现行销售税税率增至三倍几乎使消费者对税收的注意力翻倍，而考虑这一内生性会使效率成本估计值增加336%。我们的结果为有限理性地处理非完全显著激励的机制与决定因素提供了新的洞见，而我们的通用方法为稳健的行为福利分析提供了一个框架。
Abstract
This paper shows that accounting for variation in mistakes can be crucial for welfare analysis.Focusing on consumer underreaction to not-fully-salient sales taxes, we show theoretically that the efficiency costs of taxation are amplified by differences in underreaction 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 underreact 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 underreaction, 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 behavioral welfare analysis.