Environmental Protection, Consumer Awareness, Product Characteristics, and Market Power

We investigate the behavior of a polluting monopolist whose production causes a global damage affecting consumers and non-consumers alike while consumption causes a specific damage affecting consumers only. The monopolist anticipates strategically how her decisions on product variant, price and pollution affect the purchasing decisions in a Hotelling market. We compare a standard unregulated monopolist and a monopolist subject to environmental regulation. We show that both monopolists choose the same product variant, that the regulated monopolist pollutes less, produces as much or more, and charges a higher price than the unregulated one. Hence, environmental regulation always lead to an increase in price but never to a reduction in production.
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