Revenue and efficiency in pollution permit allocation mechanisms

Peyman Khezr and Ian MacKenzie

No 601, Discussion Papers Series from University of Queensland, School of Economics

Abstract: The most contentious design issue within pollution markets is the choice of initial allocation mechanism. Within this debate, auctions have become the predominant method of initial permit allocation. Although auctions provide potential gains—such as revenue generation, allocative efficiency and clear price discovery—these benefits are rarely fully realized due to firms submitting non-truthful bids. We propose a mechanism that can improve on existing auctions. In our design the regulator determines the supply (up to an upper bound) once all bids have been submitted. This simple and applicable design incites truthful revelation of firms’ private abatement costs, maximizes revenue, and allocates the permits efficiently. This design is relevant to all existing permit auctions including those in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS), Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), and the California Cap-and-Trade Program.

Keywords: multi-unit auction; pollution permit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D44 Q52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-gth and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.uq.edu.au/files/46295/601.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Revenue and efficiency in pollution permit allocation mechanisms (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qld:uq2004:601

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers Series from University of Queensland, School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SOE IT ().