Séminaire NANCY-Mireille CHIROLEU-ASSOULINE (PSE)

Détails de l'événement :

“Adoption of Cleaner Technologies: Be on the Leading Edge or Wait for the Next Opportunity?”

We study the impact of pollution taxation on the adoption of new, less and less polluting technologies likely to appear successively with uncertainty. These technologies differ only in their fixed cost of adoption and emission rate per unit produced. We consider the case of a monopoly controlled by a regulator who pre-commits to a tax level. We show that, depending on the respective fixed costs of adoption and the respective environmental benefits provided by each of the two new technologies, the regulator can cause a technological lock-in, through an excessively high level of tax if she has not foreseen the arrival of the second technology. On the other hand, if she anticipates it perfectly, she is able to push the firm to adopt it but may find it socially beneficial to prevent the firm from doing so.