Optimal Management of Durable Pollution.

This paper studies an incompletely informed regulator's problem of inducing a firm producing durable pollution to adopt a socially optimal pollution storage technology. We construct a sparse, yet flexible, theoretical model that can be applied directly to concrete situations as it is stated explicitly in terms of statistical parameters. Next, we show the existence of an optimal regulatory contract and examine its qualitative features for one of the many regulatory problems suggested by the general model. Our model extends the standard inventory model by making the firm's storage technology a strategic choice induced by the regulatory contract. Moreover, by providing a structural model of the firm, our model generates useful information that has to be assumed in an abstract regulatory model.