Voting under temptation

In the presence of temptation and self-control preferences as in Gul and Pesendorfer, the optimal policy is to subsidize savings when consumers are tempted by "excessive" impatience (Krusell, Kuruscu and Smith, 2010). However, in the homogeneous agents model, taxation loses an important property in that it fails to reduce the inequality through redistribution. Thus the phenomenon that welfare improves on subsidizing savings may vanish when the agents differ in their abilities to earn income. They may well choose a positive tax if they are from low ability group where the redistribution effect of tax dominates the temptation effect. In a political economy, a situation may easily arise where a negative tax will never be implemented. When agents are homogeneous, as temptation grows, optimal subsidy on saving increases. The corresponding result in the heterogeneous agents case is that as temptation grows, the political support for the subsidy increases.