Tax Credits and Household Behavior: The Roles of Myopic Decision-Making and Liquidity in a Simulated Economy

There has been a growing interest in multi-agent simulators in the domain of economic modeling. However, contemporary research often involves developing reinforcement learning (RL) based models that focus solely on a single type of agents, such as households, firms, or the government. Such an approach overlooks the adaptation of interacting agents thereby failing to capture the complexity of real-world economic systems. In this work, we consider a multi-agent simulator comprised of RL agents of numerous types, including heterogeneous households, firm, central bank and government. In particular, we focus on the crucial role of the government in distributing tax credits to households. We conduct two broad categories of comprehensive experiments dealing with the impact of tax credits on 1) households with varied degrees of myopia (short-sightedness in spending and saving decisions), and 2) households with diverse liquidity profiles. The first category of experiments examines the impact of the frequency of tax credits (e.g. annual vs quarterly) on consumption patterns of myopic households. The second category of experiments focuses on the impact of varying tax credit distribution strategies on households with differing liquidities. We validate our simulation model by reproducing trends observed in real households upon receipt of unforeseen, uniform tax credits, as documented in a JPMorgan Chase report. Based on the results of the latter, we propose an innovative tax credit distribution strategy for the government to reduce inequality among households. We demonstrate the efficacy of this strategy in improving social welfare in our simulation results.