Springer Science and Business Media LLC

The existing literature on eco-labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice. However, it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers. In fact, it is unclear that people’s consumption decisions are made independently of social context. For instance, under the desire to conform to certain social norms—or in the presence of status concerns—some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society. We test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans, share of fair trade beans, and price. Three treatments were used, differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers. We find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women, although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have.

Experimental methods are central to assessments of environmental valuation approaches that are operationally meaningful. Existing lab experiments focus attention sharply on the neglect of hypothetical bias. They also offer constructive solutions to correct this bias, and beg for validation in field experiments.

We provide a new approach for identifying a strategic use of equity arguments in international (climate) negotiations. We first develop a theoretical model of strategic delegation which accounts for both environmental as well as equity preferences. We show that the strategic use of equity arguments qualitatively depends on the extent to which environmental preferences can be misrepresented: representatives from different countries may be expected to have similar equity views rather than widely differing perceptions of a fair share. Based on survey data on climate negotiations, we then provide empirical evidence for differences between equity preferences of citizens from Germany, China, and the U.S. and the perceived view on the position of their respective countries.

The paper considers an industry where production costs rise due to pollution, but where this effect can be partially off-set by investing in adaptation as a private good. The focus is not on external effects, but industries where economies of scale are introduced from adapting to pollution. The structure of the resulting oligopolistic market is endogenous, since the level of adaptation is chosen by the firms. The analysis of externalities usually disregards defensive or adaptation measures, with a few exceptions that point to considerable complications. The present debate on adaptation to climate change shows the importance of understanding defensive measures. I show that the market failure caused by economies of scale leads to production costs above the social optimum, i.e. to under-adapation. When pollution increases, adaptation only increases if demand is price inelastic. Otherwise, welfare loss from market failure decreases with pollution. The total welfare loss is only convex if demand is price inelastic and the influence of pollution on production costs is stronger than the influence of adaptation. Concave welfare loss has crucial implications for abatement policies.

We examine whether voluntary pollution abatement programs in which there is no program-specific participation incentive are effective in reducing emissions below what they would have been otherwise. We use data on facility participation in the 33/50 Program and emissions reported to the US EPA’s toxic releases inventory (TRI) between 1991 and 1995 for a sample of facilities whose parent firms committed to the program. By focusing on participation by individual facilities we avoid the influence of firm level incentives under the program. The mandatory disclosure of emissions data to the TRI avoids the potential bias evident in voluntarily disclosed data. We find that while facilities with larger total emissions were more likely to participate, there is no evidence of greater participation by facilities that account for a higher share of a parent firm’s 33/50 emissions. Although emissions of the 33/50 chemicals fell over the years, we find that participation in the program was not associated with the decline in the 33/50 releases generated by these facilities and the reductions seemed to have occurred for reasons unrelated to the program.

New policy approaches to facilitate the co-existence of wildlife and livestock are needed for situations where predation incidents greatly impact households’ income and retaliatory killing threatens endangered carnivore species’ survival. In this paper, models are developed to assess how two alternative policy approaches impact a herder’s decisions on carnivore hunting and livestock protection. We find that while the well-established ex-post compensation policy induces suboptimal livestock protection it can generate sufficient incentives for the herder to refrain from hunting so that the carnivore population reaches its socially optimal level. Performance payments are proposed as alternative policy. They are found not to distort livestock protection incentives and can also help achieve a socially optimal carnivore population level. Which of the two scheme types gives rise to less cost is ambiguous. An empirical analysis of the model with data from tiger-livestock conflicts in India is presented.

Fisheries in the East China Sea (ECS) face multiple concerning trends. Aside from depleted stocks caused by overfishing, illegal encroachments by fishermen from one nation into another’s legal waters are a common occurrence. This behavior presumably could be stopped via strong monitoring, controls, and surveillance (MCS), but MCS is routinely rated as below standards for nations bordering the ECS. This paper generalizes the ECS to a model of a congested maritime environment, defined as an environment where multiple nations can fish in the same waters with equivalent operating costs, and uses game-theoretic analysis to explain why the observed behavior persists in the ECS. The paper finds that nations in congested environments are incentivized to issue excessive quotas, which in turn tacitly encourages illegal fishing and extracts illegal rent from another’s legal waters. This behavior couldn’t persist in the face of strong MCS measures, and states are thus likewise incentivized to use poor MCS. A bargaining problem is analyzed to complement the noncooperative game, and a key finding is the nation with lower nonoperating costs has great leverage during the bargain.