关键词: 合作博弈, 个人综合所得税, 地区间财政关系

Abstract:

The tax of personal comprehensive income is determined by the individual’s comprehensive income which may come from different regions. For the taxpayer with income from multiple sources, two new problems of tax refund allocation and tax revenue distribution among different regions will arise. Tax refund allocation problem is which region should bear the burden of tax refund; tax revenue regional allocation problem is how to align the tax revenue for the income from different regions because of the progressive tax rate of the individual income tax. The current solution is to require the region in charge of the individual annual income tax settlement to pay all the tax refund and allow it to obtain the back taxes of the full settlement. This solution does not take into account the fair position of the income from different regions in the tax creation, which will lead to the difference of tax rates applied to the income from different regional sources and the tax burden exporting among different regions.
Regional tax distribution is an important policy to balance the regional fiscal revenue and improve the individual income tax system. The distribution of the tax revenue should guarantee the basic rights of each region to the local tax revenue, and ensure that all regions share the benefits of cooperation.
An inter-regional tax distribution method needs to have at least three properties: efficiency, symmetry and monotonicity. Efficiency means that the total tax revenue should be distributed among all regions, and there should be no cross-subsidies between regions. Symmetry means that the same amount of the tax revenue should be distributed to the two regions which contribute the same amount of the income. Monotonicity means that the amount of the tax revenue distributed to the region which contributes more to the comprehensive income should be no less than that distributed to the region with a smaller share of the comprehensive income.
The individual income tax has the following characteristics: the large number of individual income tax payers, the frequent regional mobility and the clear sources of the income. These make it possible to distribute fairly and reasonably the tax revenue among regions by means of a fixed formula according to the comprehensive income of taxpayers from different places. The method of the fixed formula is of fairness, openness, and impartiality. In this paper, the regional distribution of the individual comprehensive income tax is modeled as a cooperative game problem, and the corresponding solutions of cooperative game provide the practical distribution method.
The cooperative game theory is a theory that describes how to distribute the benefits of cooperation fairly and reasonably among the participants when there is a binding agreement among them. The Shapley value, the Nucleolus value and the τ value are three popular solutions of cooperative games which satisfy the properties of efficiency, symmetry and monotonicity. In a cooperative game, different interpretations of the “Fairness principle” lead to different solutions. The Shapley value reflects the principle of the marginal contribution, the Nucleolus the principle of equality of the worst-off and the τ value the principle of the proportional compromise between the ideal value and the minimum right value in a cooperative game. The minimum right value reflects the minimum claim that the player should get at least when he is willing to participate in the game, and the ideal value is the maximum possible gain that he can get when he participates in the cooperation. In the allocation of the τ value, after each participant is guaranteed to get his or her minimum value, the remainder of the cooperative benefit is distributed proportionally to the ideal value that each participant has yet to meet. Compared with the Shapley value and the Nucleolus allocation, the τ value allocation is simple and integrates the advantages of the proportional allocation method, which is easy to use and has the potential of popularization.
The solutions of the cooperative game are efficient, fair and transparent division methods that are consistent with the status of fiscal decentralization among regions and take into consideration the reality of the win-win cooperation and the conflict of interests in regional cooperation.

Key words: Cooperative Game, Individual Comprehensive Income Tax, Regional Fiscal Relationship