FOURTH TEXT

Most of the business of the government Tsar Peter the Great in those years concerned the war and taxes. Peter’s decrees, like his constant traveling through the country, almost invariably dealt with the enrollment of recruits or the collection of revenues. The Tsar’s demands for money were insatiable. In one attempt to uncover new sources of income, Peter in 1708 created a service of revenue officers, men whose duty it was to devise new ways of taxing the people. Called by the foreign name “fiscals,” they were commanded to “sit and make income for the Sovereign Lord.” The leader and most successful was Alexis Kurbatov, the former serf of Boris Sheremetev who had already attracted Peter’s attention with his proposal for requiring that government-stamped paper be used for all legal documents. Under Kurbatov and his ingenious, fervently hated colleagues, new taxes were levied on a wide range of human activities. There was a tax on births, on marriages, on funerals and on the registration of wills. There was a tax on wheat and tallow. Horses were taxed, and horse hides and horse collars. There was a hat tax and a strove all the time to uncover new sources of revenuetax on the wearing of leather boots. The beard tax was systematized and enforced, and a tax on mustaches was added. Ten percent was collected from all cab fares. Houses in Moscow were taxed, and beehives throughout Russia. There was a bed tax, a bath tax, an inn tax, had an insatiable thirst for revenue.a tax on kitchen chimneys and on the firewood that burned in them. Nuts, melons, cucumbers were taxed. There was even a tax on drinking water.

Money also came form an increasing number of state monopolies. This arrangement, whereby the state took control of the production and sale of a commodity, setting any price it wished, was applied to alcohol, resin, tar, fish, oil, chalk, potash, rhubarb, dice, chessmen, playing cards, and the skins of Siberian foxes, ermines and sables. The flax monopoly granted to English merchants was taken back by the Russian government. The tobacco monopoly given by Peter to Lord Carmathen in England in 1698 was abolished. The solid-oak coffins in which wealthy Muscovites elegantly spent eternity were taken over by the state and then sold at four times the original price. Of all the monopolies, however, the one most profitable to the government and most oppressive to the people was the monopoly on salt. Established by decree in 1705, it fixed the price at twice the cost to the government. Peasants who could not afford the higher price often sickened and died. (Massie, Robert. K. Peter the Great – His Life and World. Ballantine Books. New York, 1980: 401).

According to the text, taxes were levied on:

Item 0: wheat and soybeans;

Na economia, há dois tipos de agentes: 50% são do tipo 1, otimista e despreocupado, e 50% são do tipo 2, pessimista e estressado. Os dois possuem um carro avaliado em R$ 20.000 e poderiam adquirir um dispositivo anti-furto por R$ 1.000, o que reduziria a probabilidade de furto de 30% para 15%. Porém, somente os agentes do tipo 2 adquirem este dispositivo. Supondo que a seguradora não tenha como distinguir entre os dois tipos de agentes, utilize o índice de utilidade de von Neumann-Morgenstern para avaliar a seguinte assertiva

Item 4: A seguradora realizará um lucro estritamente positivo em cada apólice vendida caso, não reconhecendo a característica do mercado, venda seguros ao preço de R$ 4.500.