Tax avoidance and the political appeal of progressivity

Empiriquement, on observe que la majorité des Etats a fait le choix d'un système d'imposition progressif. Pourtant, le fondement théorique de ce choix n'est pas évident. Si l'on interprète le système d'imposition appliquée comme le résultat d'un jeu entre deux partis politiques Downsiens, le fait que la majorité de la population soit relativement pauvre permet de conforter l'observation empirique. Cependant, des résultats théoriques récents montrent que, à l'équilibre, des électeurs purement égoïstes ne font pas toujours ce choix-là. Cet article tente de raffiner ces derniers modèles théoriques pour proposer une autre explication au choix d'un système progressif. Notre thèse est la suivante : la présence d'évasion fiscale – caractéristique importante des systèmes d'imposition sur le revenu – a des effets sur l'équilibre du jeu politique en modifiant les préférences des individus les plus riches de la société. Dans un premier temps, l'ensemble des équilibres en stratégies mixtes du jeu est caractérisé (pour des systèmes d'imposition de type quadratique), et on montre alors que l'évasion fiscale renforce l'élection de systèmes progressifs d'imposition. Dans un deuxième temps, on analyse un cas de système d'imposition de type “wiggling" en montrant que l'évasion fiscale mène, quand elle est suffisamment importante, à l'élection de systèmes progressifs d'imposition avec certitude.Compétition électorale;Taxtation du revenu progressive;Evasion fiscale;Equilibre en stratégies mixtes

Communication and Bargaining in the Spatial Model

This paper studies collective choice by participants possessing private information about the consequences of policy decisions in policymaking institutions that involve cheap-talk communication and bargaining. The main result establishes a connection between the extent to which problems of this type posses fully-revealing equilibria that select policies in the full information majority rule core (when it is well-defined) and the extent to which a fictitious sender-receiver game possesses a fully revealing equilibria. This result allows us to extend Banks and Duggan's (2000) core equivalence results to the case of noisy policymaking environments with private information when some combination of nonexclusivity and preference alignment conditions are satisfied.

Robust Rational Turnout

We establish that, except for a finite set of common costs of participation, all equilibria of a class of complete information voting games (as in Palfrey and Rosenthal (1983)) are regular. Thus, all the equilibria of these games (including those exhibiting high turnout rates) are robust to small but arbitrary payoff perturbations, and survive in nearby games with incomplete information about voting costs and/or about the fraction of supporters of the two candidates. We also show that all the equilibria of these complete information games exhibit minimal heterogeneity of behavior, so that the strategies of indifferent players are characterized by at most two probabilities.Turnout, Regular Equilibrium.

Robust Rational Turnout

We establish that, except for a finite set of common costs of participation, all equilibria of a class of complete information voting games (as in Palfrey and Rosenthal (1983)) are regular. Thus, all the equilibria of these games (including those exhibiting high turnout rates) are robust to small but arbitrary payoff perturbations, and survive in nearby games with incomplete information about voting costs and/or about the fraction of supporters of the two candidates. We also show that all the equilibria of these complete information games exhibit minimal heterogeneity of behavior, so that the strategies of indifferent players are characterized by at most two probabilities.Turnout, Regular Equilibrium.

Learning the Structure and Parameters of Large-Population Graphical Games from Behavioral Data

We consider learning, from strictly behavioral data, the structure and parameters of linear influence games (LIGs), a class of parametric graphical games introduced by Irfan and Ortiz (2014). LIGs facilitate causal strategic inference (CSI): Making inferences from causal interventions on stable behavior in strategic settings. Applications include the identification of the most influential individuals in large (social) networks. Such tasks can also support policy-making analysis. Motivated by the computational work on LIGs, we cast the learning problem as maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) of a generative model defined by pure-strategy Nash equilibria (PSNE). Our simple formulation uncovers the fundamental interplay between goodness-of-fit and model complexity: good models capture equilibrium behavior within the data while controlling the true number of equilibria, including those unobserved. We provide a generalization bound establishing the sample complexity for MLE in our framework. We propose several algorithms including convex loss minimization (CLM) and sigmoidal approximations. We prove that the number of exact PSNE in LIGs is small, with high probability; thus, CLM is sound. We illustrate our approach on synthetic data and real-world U.S. congressional voting records. We briefly discuss our learning framework's generality and potential applicability to general graphical games.Comment: Journal of Machine Learning Research. (accepted, pending publication.) Last conference version: submitted March 30, 2012 to UAI 2012. First conference version: entitled, Learning Influence Games, initially submitted on June 1, 2010 to NIPS 201

Extreme Voting under Proportional Representation: The Multidimensional Case

We study the strategic behavior of voters in a model of proportional representation, in which thepolicy space is multidimensional. Our main finding is that in large electorate, under some assumptionson voters'preferences, voters essentially vote, in any equilibrium, only for the extreme parties

Political Competition (A theory with applications to the distribution of income)

The formal model of political competition almost ubiquitously employed by students of political economy is one in which political parties play no role. That model, introduced by Anthony Downs (1957) over forty years ago, portrays a competition between candidates, whose sole motivation for engaging in politics is to enjoy the power and perquisites of office holding. Although voters care about policies, the candidates do not; for them, a policy is simply an instrument to be used, opportunistically, as an entry ticket to a prosperous career. Political parties, however, have, throughout the history of democracy, cared about policies, perhaps because they are formed by interest groups of citizens. Therefore the Downsian model cannot be viewed as an historically accurate model of party competition.

On the asymptotic uniqueness of bargaining equilibria

The paper studies the model of multilateral bargaining over the alternatives representedby points in the mâdimensional Euclidean space. Proposers are chosen randomly and the acceptance of a proposal requires the unanimous approval of it by all the players. The focus of the paper is on the asymptotic behavior of subgame perfect equilibria in pure stationary strategies (called bargaining equilibria) as the breakdown probability tends to zero. Bargaining equilibria are said to be asymptotically unique if the limit of a sequence of bargaining equilibria as the breakdown probability tends to zero is independent of the choice of the sequence and is uniquely determined by the primitives of the model. We show that the limit of any sequence of bargaining equilibria is a zero point of the soâcalled linearization correspondence. The asymptotic uniqueness of bargaining equilibria is then deduced in each of the following cases: (1) m = n−1, where n is the number of players, (2) m = 1, and (3) in the case where the utility functions are quadratic, for each 1 ≤ m ≤ n−1. In each case the linearization correspondence is shown to have a unique zero. Result 1 hasbeen established earlier in Miyakawa and Laruelle and Valenciano. Result 2 is subsumed by the result in Predtetchinski. Result 3 is new.microeconomics ;

On the expect of ideology in proportional representation systems

In this paper we propose a model in which there are ideological and strategic voters who vote under poportional rule. We prove that the behavior of ideological voters matters, in that it a¤ects the outcome. We also show how a subset of strategic voters changes his voting be- havior to balance the ideological players? votes. However, they can only partially adjust. Strategic voters will vote accordingly to this cutpoint outcome: any strategic voter on its right votes for the right- most party and any strategic voter on its left votes for the leftmost party.Proportional Election, Strategic Voting, Ideological Voting.