One of the main challenges to the idea that the government should intervene to frame choices to counteract lack of information and procrastination is the existence of competitive markets for doing the same. Sure, it might be very difficult to understand, for example, how to claim back tax if you have worked abroad and even if there might be a lot of money to be got, people may still not bother due to poor information and/or procrastination.
Anybody who did a J1 as a student in the States will remember the nice warm glow of getting your tax back sometime in the months after coming back, usually at time when it was direly needed. Most of us would have arranged this through a cool company called taxback.com. The bright guys behind this recently won the main Irish entrepreneurship award for bringing the concept across the world and developing it across a number of other domains. They deserve a lot of credit for observing a basic feature of human nature and developing a simple business model for developing this insight into a service that many people have now benefited from.
link here
If anyone wants to pick the brains of behavioural economists to think about how people make decisions such as applying for tax refunds, then please join us on November 6th.
1 comment:
The final programme is online here. Interesting summary stats on the nominees from about 18 mins on.
(And to get the family plug out of the way, a cute child makes his television debut after 19 mins 30 seconds.)
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