Let Y=(Y 1 ,Y 2 , .Yn) -0 be an income distribution pattern ton-"income receiving units" which may be n-persons, n-farnilies, n-states of the same country or n-countries.Abstractly, a fiscal program is a course of action, undertaken by social conseasus, under which portions of the incomes of certain receiving units are transferred to other receiving units to render the income distribution more equitable.The most familiar example of such a fiscal program is the collection of taxes from individuals (or individual families) with the revenue being paid out as.welfare payments by the government.As another example, the Federal government may collect taxes from the states only to give some of the revenue back to the states under a "revenue sharing" program.An international consortium or the World Bank may work out a formula under which contributions will be solicited from the wealthy countries or "donors" to provide foreign aid or make concessionary loans to the poor countries.This paper is concerned with the principles governing the design of such equity oriented fiscal programs.The first general principle concerns the "rationality" of the fiscal program.Suppose the income level of "i" is higher that that of "j".On the one hand, a principle of "minimally progressive" suggests that, in case "i" and "j" are taxpayers, "i" should pay no less taxes than "j" and, in case "i" and "j" are recipients of welfare payments "i" should receive no more than "j".On the other hand, a principle of "incentive perservation" suggests that the disposable income of "i" should be no less than that of "j"--i.e. the fiscal program clearly should not reverse their relative income ranks in order to preserve the incentive for the individuals .,. ..

Auditors are faced with the task of formulating opinions about the fairness of their clients' financial statements. In doing so, they use their professional judgment to determine the type and amount of information to collect, the timing and manner of collecting it, and the implications of the information collected. This information is rarely, if ever, perfectly reliable or perfectly predictive of the "true" state of a client's financial statements. Nevertheless, auditors may be held liable at common law or under the federal securities laws should the audited financial statements prove to be unrepresentative of this true state. Thus, it is important for auditors to have the ability to formulate appropriately judgments based on probabilistic data. In this paper, we describe the results of experiments designed to assess whether auditors formulate judgments in accordance' with normative principles of decision making or whether a particular alternative to the normative model of decision making under uncertainty 's employed. In the next section, we discuss several alternatives to normative decision models, focusing on the anchoring and adjustment heuristic which forms the basis for our experiments.

The primary purpose of this paper is to test for the use of the representativeness heuristic by auditors in situations in which its use will lead to judgments that systematically depart from the Bayesian optimal responses. No explicit representation of payoffs was made, nor were subjects typically asked to choose a course of action. Thus it cannot be concluded that use of the representativeness heuristic in the experimental situations tested is not cost effective. To the extent, however, that one is willing to assume that action choices are sensitive to judgments of outcome probabilities, and these action choices have differential expected payoffs, a finding of extensive heuristic use by auditors would suggest further research to assess the economic consequences of such use.