Environmental Citizen Suits with Pigovian Punitive Damages

Sung-Hoon Park () and Jason Shogren

Asian Journal of Law and Economics, 2010, vol. 1, issue 1, 19

Abstract: Federal environmental laws encourage private citizens to act like "private attorney generals" and to sue a firm. This citizen group competes over the rewards of levels of regulation and enforcement. The firm can reduce its output to curtail the likelihood of losing the contest. This paper explores whether one can combine citizen suits with Pigovian punitive damages to equate private and social incentives. We show: (i) without punitive damages, the level of output of the firm is only optimal in a special case; (ii) with punitive damages given to the citizen group, Pigovian punitive damages can be found, but it could be negative--the citizen group might have to compensate the firm; (iii) the ideal level of punitive damages can be achieved if a government takes it; and (iv) punitive damages which are taken by the citizen group induces more effort expended in the conflict relative to when the government receives the punitive damages.

Keywords: citizen suits; environmental damage; marginal environmental damage; marginal net benefit; Pigovian punitive damages; total legal expenditures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/2154-4611.1001 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
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:bpj:ajlecn:v:1:y:2010:i:1:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ajle/html

DOI: 10.2202/2154-4611.1001

Access Statistics for this article

Asian Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Noriyuki Yanagawa

More articles in Asian Journal of Law and Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().