Consumer's Environmental Awareness and the Role of (Green) Entrepreneurship: Lessons from Environmental Quality Competition and R&D Activities for Environmental Policy

Torben Klarl

No 321, Discussion Paper Series from Universitaet Augsburg, Institute for Economics

Abstract: In the recent last years, in particular in the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis, many countries initiated economic recovery plans with a major focus on stimulating green entrepreneurial activities to revive economic growth. Further, the recovery plans intend to improve a country's awareness for a direct orientation towards (strong) sustainability and green growth.Before discussing strategies towards green growth, in this paper we propose a novel framework to increase our understanding of the interplay of process R&D activities, the strategic price and environmental quality setting of heterogeneous entrepreneurs in a market where consumers feel up to paying for environmental quality improvement of a vertically differentiated good. In the paper we decompose an entrepreneur's incentive conducting process R&D in four parts. In particular we show that an entrepreneur's incentive of conducting own process R&D is reduced due to the existence of knowledge-spillovers. Moreover, due to the strategic complementarities, both in prices as well as in environmental quality, a strategic effect reinforces the negative consequences of the spillover-effect. We show that the externalities in the model require corrections based upon a mixture of fiscal policies and a process R&D subvention scheme establishing a first-best solution. We further thoroughly discuss the implementation of a second-best solution and derive environmental policy implications.

Keywords: Technological change; Process R&D; Green consumerism; Vertical differentiation; Emission tax; Environmental quality; Environmental policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 L13 L15 O31 O33 Q55 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ene, nep-ent, nep-env and nep-ino
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https://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/files/71096/321.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Consumer's Environmental Awareness and the Role of (Green) Entrepreneurship: Lessons from Environmental Quality Competition and R&D Activities for Environmental Policy (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aug:augsbe:0321

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