How gender and prosociality affect machine interaction in tax compliance: A game-theoretic experiment

• We examine how gender and prosociality affect machine interaction in tax compliance. • We bridge research on algorithm aversion and gender differences in economic behavior. • Prosociality is effective not against algorithms but against humans. This study explores how gender and prosociality affect machine interaction in tax compliance, assuming a game-theoretic situation in which the tax auditor is a human (participant) or computer. We adopt an experimental design with 116 participants, using a game-theoretic model between taxpayers and auditors. Our experimental results show that taxpayers report less tax-compliant behavior to computer than human auditors. Regarding the participants’ individual characteristics, men are more likely to more aggressively evade tax payments than women under the computer auditor condition, and participants with prosocial tendencies are more likely to engage in tax compliance when the tax auditor is human. Our study sheds light on policymaking for tax compliance in the digital age.