Delegation as Commitment: The Case of Income Tax Audits
研究在合同不完全的情况下，将所得税审计政策委托给管理者能否实现完全承诺下的福利水平，发现基于可观察总量指标的简单激励方案可以达成这一目标，而政府直接承诺则不能。
In this article we study the value of delegating authority over income tax audit policy, arising from the incompleteness of contracts. Consider a utilitarian government whose ability to commit is limited to aggregate dimensions of its audit policy, as publicly verifiable information about detailed allocations of audit budgets is not available. We show that the welfare level associated with the full-commitment solution can be attained by delegating authority over audit policy to a manager. The latter is offered a simple incentive scheme based only on the aggregate variables which are publicly observable. In contrast, if the government retains authority, direct commitment to these same variables does not allow the full-commitment welfare level to be achieved. Thus, despite sharing a common informational basis, delegation may perform better than centralized arrangements in the presence of incomplete contracts.