15. Nudging in Tax Law?

The paper concentrates on the experimental verification of the rule based categorization hypothesis in context of the tax law regulation. We’ve built a simple experiment in which we asked participants - students of law (N = 15) to categorize 17 objects displayed on the photographs. The subjects were instructed to categorize objects for the purpose of tax law classification, resulting with the assessment of a proper tax rate. The results are presented from the perspective of the rule-based categorization theory. In our study we use an eye-tracker (SensoMotoric Instruments, model RED 250 Hz) to record the movements of eyeballs, and to check whether the eye-tracking parameters such as; the number of fixations, regressions from the picture of the object in determined areas of interest. The experiment revealed differences in eye movement patterns, reactions times when participants evaluated ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ objects. The purpose of this paper is thus relatively modest. The major research question is descriptive rather than normative. The study concentrates on the possibility and cognitive effectiveness of nudging in a very narrow field of legislative design rather than on the debate on the normative implications of this strategy. However we believe that this contribution on descriptive aspects of cognitive processes presupposes the debate on the legitimacy of nudging from the wider normative, legal and moral perspective.