Behavioral Analysis of Willingness to Pay Taxes(A Case Study of Semnan Industrial Town)

Most tax policies are based on how taxpayers make decisions based on classical economic models. However, the studies show that the conventional decision-making models that are independent of the foundations of  social  psychology and they are designed only based on economic components, cannot explain the changes and the precise way of decision makers. The tax tendency is one of the most important approaches to improve the efficiency of tax organizations. The goals of this approach are achieved when it can properly identify and control the factors affecting it. The aim of this study is to investigate the willingness to pay taxes using behavioral economics tools. Therefore, the questionnaires were distributed among the production units located in Semnan industrial town with 50 workers or more to examine the taxpayers tendency to pay taxes. The findings show that there are two implications of behavioral economics, other measures of behavioral economics such as ownership effect, subjective accounting, anchor effect, fairness and etc, explain the willingness of individuals to pay taxes. Therefore, if the government pays special attention to the criteria of behavioral economics in collecting taxes, the most taxpayers are willing to pay the right amount of tax timely.