Getting Polluters to Tell the Truth

Marcelo Caffera and Juan Dubra ()

Microeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We study the problem of a regulator who must control the emissions of a given pollutant from a series of industries when the firms' abatement costs are unknown. We develop a mechanism in which the regulator asks firms to report their abatement costs and implements the most stringent emissions standard consistent with the firms' declarations. He also inspects one of the firms in each industry which declared the cost structure consistent with the least stringent emissions standard and with an arbitrarily small probability, he discovers whether the report was true or not. The firm is punished with an arbitrarily small fine if and only if its report was false. This mechanism is simple, is implementable in practice, its unique equilibrium is truth telling by firms, it implements the first best pollution standards and shares some features of the regulatory processes actually observed in reality.

Keywords: Emissions Standards; Command and Control; Undominated Nash Implementation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 D82 Q20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2005-04-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-res
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 14
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/mic/papers/0504/0504008.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Getting Polluters to Tell the Truth (2016)
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:wpa:wuwpmi:0504008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Microeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).