arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Alex A. T. Rathke.
We show that a rational agent with true and refinable knowledge of events cannot know if she knows everything or not. This epistemic limitation is not resolved by introspection about tautologies or by learning about new events.
For the standard lattice model of information structures, we derive a reduced poset representation which provides the same informational content as the complete lattice structure which derives it. Rational agents can recover the complete lattice of events by means of the reduced poset alone. We find that both structures provide isomorphic models under mild conditions.
We propose a knowledge operator based on the agent's possibility correspondence which preserves her non-trivial unawareness within the standard state-space model. Our approach may provide a solution to the classical impossibility result that 'an unaware agent must be aware of everything'.
This study analyses the tax-induced profit shifting behaviour of firms and the impact of governments' anti-shifting rules. We derive a model of a firm that combines internal sales and internal debt in a full profit shifting strategy, and which is required to apply the arm's length principle and a general thin capitalisation rule. We find several cases where the firm may shift profits to low-tax countries while satisfying the usual arm's length conditions in all countries. Internal sales and internal debt may be regarded either as complementary or as substitute shifting channels, depending on how the implicit concealment costs vary after changes in all transactions. We show that the cross-effect between the shifting channels facilitates profit shifting by means of accepted transfer prices and interest rates.
We show that the knowledge of an agent carrying non-trivial unawareness violates the standard property of 'necessitation', therefore necessitation cannot be used to refute the standard state-space model. A revised version of necessitation preserves non-trivial unawareness and solves the classical Dekel-Lipman-Rustichini result. We propose a generalised knowledge operator consistent with the standard state-space model of unawareness, including the model of infinite state-space.
We propose a parametric specification of the probability of tax penalisation faced by a taxpayer, based on the amount of deduction chosen by her to reduce total taxation. Comparative analyses lead to a closed-form solution for the optimum tax deduction, and provide the maximising conditions with respect to the probability parameters.
This paper proposes a model of optimal tax-induced transfer pricing with a fuzzy arm's length parameter. Fuzzy numbers provide a suitable structure for modelling the ambiguity that is intrinsic to the arm's length parameter. For the usual conditions regarding the anti-shifting mechanisms, the optimal transfer price becomes a maximising $α$-cut of the fuzzy arm's length parameter. Nonetheless, we show that it is profitable for firms to choose any maximising transfer price if the probability of tax audit is sufficiently low, even if the chosen price is considered a completely non-arm's length price by tax authorities. In this case, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions to prevent this extreme shifting strategy