“Behaviourally informed interventions often aim to assist rather than to prohibit certain decisions, in keeping with the idea of regulatory policy as an enabler and facilitator to achieve positive outcomes.”*

BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS INSPIRATION. “Most cases where behavioural economics has been applied to policy concern regulatory policy or, frequently, an attempt to pursue regulatory goals without resorting to additional rules or sanctions. [...] Three principles of behavioural economics feature strongly in the early applications to regulatory design. First, choices are influenced by the simplicity of information and of the range of available options. Second, people are drawn towards more convenient options, especially default options. Third, the salience of options or attributes can affect how they are weighted in decisions.”**

EXTENDING BEHAVIOURALLY INFORMED SOLUTIONS. “Behavioural economics is influencing policy in a number of OECD countries, but most explicitly in the United States and the United Kingdom. [...] In other countries, the application of behavioural economics to policy is increasingly common in certain policy areas, especially pensions, tax and consumer protection. Also the European Commission has engaged in several behaviourally informed initiatives […].”*** The TAXPARENT solution tries to extend behaviourally informed tools to the area of corporate structure regulation through so-called clever rules.

PRACTICAL APPLICATION THROUGH CLEVER RULES. Clever rules translate the findings of behavioural economy into real life application. First, clever rules raise costs do not prescribe and sanction, but give incentives to perform positive action. Second, clever rules assume that the large majority of persons are “normally opportunistic”: they will disregard incentives and prefer to act immorally if it is more advantageous for them, in particular if costs of immoral action are low and there is a little risk of negative publicity. Clever rules, thus, aim at making positive behaviour more economically advantageous by raising the costs of immoral action and increasing risk of its discovery and reputational damage. In concrete terms, because devising aggressive tax planning schemes for multinational companies is cheap and there is an incoherence of tax rules and cooperation between national tax authorities and a little risk for „aggressive tax opportunists“ to suffer reputational damage, a considerable number of businesses naturally succumb to the lure of „paying close to nothing to the society.“

ENFORCEMENT OF CLEVER RULES BY THE GENERAL PUBLIC. Last but not least, clever rules build on transparency so that the primary enforcement entity can be the general public in order to lower enforcement costs for public authorities. Indeed the general public is the toughest, the least corruptible and the cheapest enforcer. Surveillance of authorities is complementary in situations where spcialised knowledge is necessary to carr out an effetive surveillance. Indeed the general public is the toughest, the least corruptible and the cheapest enforcer.