Radical activism and self-regulation: An optimal campaign mechanism

Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline and Ariane Lambert-Mogiliansky

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2023, vol. 118, issue C

Abstract: This article studies the problem faced by activists who want to maximize firms’ compliance with high environmental standards. Our focus is on radical activism which relies on non-violent civil disobedience. The threat of disruptive actions is used to force firms to concede, i.e., to engage in self-regulation. We adopt a mechanism design approach to characterize an optimal campaign. The analysis indicates that the least vulnerable and most polluting firms should be targeted with disruptive actions while the others are granted a guarantee not to be targeted in exchange for concessions. This characterization allows us to study the determinants of the activist’s strength and how it is affected by repression, a central feature in civil disobedience. We find that an optimal campaign is relatively resilient to repression and that it creates incentives to free ride in the prosecution for individual firms. Next, we consider heterogeneity in firms’ abatement costs and find that an optimal campaign optimizes the allocation of abatement efforts and creates incentives for innovation. We discuss some other welfare properties of the optimal campaign.

Keywords: Private environmental politics; Activist campaign; Mechanism design; Self-regulation; Repression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D44 D82 H23 L31 Q59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069623000074
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Radical Activism and Self-regulation: An Optimal Campaign Mechanism (2022)
Working Paper: Radical Activism and Self-regulation: An Optimal Campaign Mechanism (2022)
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:eee:jeeman:v:118:y:2023:i:c:s0095069623000074

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeem.2023.102789

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management is currently edited by M.A. Cole, A. Lange, D.J. Phaneuf, D. Popp, M.J. Roberts, M.D. Smith, C. Timmins, Q. Weninger and A.J. Yates

More articles in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().