Compliance with the law

The effectiveness of law as an instrument of social control depends on the assumptions lawmakers and implementers have about human behavior. The tax laws offer a good example of the difficulties in trying to anticipate what people will do in response to various legal requirements. This paper proposes a new approach to understanding tax compliance drawn from behavioral decision theory. The paper discusses the issue of rationality, explores the strategies people use to make taxpaying decisions, focuses on the distinction between norm-processing and outcome-processing strategies, and presents some implications of this approach for research and for legal policy making.