In a tournament, competitors may have the incentive to engage in undesirable activities, or cheating, in order to gain an advantage. Examples of such activities include the taking of steroids, plagiarism, and quot;creative accountingquot;. This paper considers the problem of deterrence of such...

There exists a large literature on the optimal deterrence of crime. Within the literature, however, there exists a controversy over what the appropriate criterion is to determine optimality. The most popular method is that of maximization of a utilitarian welfare function. The controversy stems...

In this paper we consider the role of governments in designing their policy for tax planning strategies. We consider two distinct types of social costs: the cost associated with lost tax revenue, and the cost that arises from taxpayers' search for new methods to reduce their tax burden....

Taxation is one of the few things that we can take as a given in life. People will always look for ways to minimize the tax burdens that governments seek to impose on them. Indeed, there is a very well-developed industry devoted to that end. How should governments proceed? We develop an economic...