Technological Lock-in Due to Environmental Taxation

Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline and Xavier Koch

No 12807, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study how a committed emission tax shapes the adoption of successively cleaner technologies that arrive over time under uncertainty. Environmental policy increasingly relies on carbon prices that are set in advance and held fixed while such technologies emerge, and we show that this very commitment can lock firms into an inferior technology. In a two-period model, technologies differ only in their fixed adoption cost and emission rate; a regulator commits to a uniform tax and firms choose whether and when to adopt. Under monopoly with perfect foresight, the regulator can induce adoption of the cleanest technology but is sometimes better off not doing so, when its environmental gain falls short of the adoption cost. Under imperfect information the commitment cuts both ways: under-estimating the likelihood of the cleanest technology sets the tax too low, so the firm waits and stalls on its initial technology, whereas over-estimating it sets the tax so high that adoption is blocked altogether. The misperception distorts only the first-period adoption margin, over a benefit–cost band whose width scales with the size of the error. Competition sharpens the trade-off. With symmetric firms a strictly higher tax is needed to trigger adoption, so competition unambiguously raises the cost of inducing a green transition - even though the welfare ranking of monopoly and duopoly remains ambiguous. When one firm enjoys an adoption-cost advantage, it eases adoption for its rival and relaxes the regulator’s problem, pointing to a role for targeted first-adopter support alongside the tax.

Keywords: technology adoption; environmental regulation; commitment; path dependency; emission taxes; monopoly; Cournot duopoly; uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D42 H23 O33 Q55 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12807.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ces:ceswps:_12807

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().