@techreport{Kanbur2004welfarist,
abstract = {Research in behavioral economics has uncovered the widespread phenomenon of people
making decisions against their own good intentions. In these situations, the government might
want to intervene, indeed individuals might want the government to intervene, to induce
behavior that is closer to what individuals wish they were doing. The analysis of such
corrective interventions, through taxes and subsidies, might be called ?behavioral public
economics.? However, such analysis, where the government has an objective function that is
different from that of individuals, is not new in public economics. In these cases the
government is said to be ?non-welfarist? in its objectives, and there is a long tradition of nonwelfarist
welfare economics, especially the analysis of optimal taxation and subsidy policy
where the outcomes of individual behavior are evaluated using a preference function different
from the one that generated the outcomes. The object of this paper is to first of all present a
unified view of the non-welfarist optimal taxation literature and, secondly, to present
behavioral public economics as a natural special case of this general framework.},
author = {Ravi Kanbur and Jukka Pirttilae and Matti Tuomala},
copyright = {http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen},
keywords = {H23; H21; 330; non-welfarism; optimal taxation; behavioral economics; Optimale Besteuerung; Verhaltens\"{o}konomik; Finanzwissenschaft; Theorie},
language = {eng},
number = {1291},
title = {Non-welfarist optimal taxation and behavioral public economics},
type = {CESifo working papers},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10419/18929},
year = {2004}
}
