Environmental sustainability under production competition with costly adjustments: An appraisal of firms’ behavior with regard to pollution dynamics

The waning efficiency of natural pollution sinks and the predicted consequence of their irreversible transformation into pollution sources within the current century call into question the environmental sustainability of economic activity and, more specifically, its basic engine: horizontal competition. Among factors likely to cast doubt on the environmental sustainability of competition, competing firms’ approaches to pollution control deserve particular attention because myopic approaches that ignore pollution dynamics accelerate such transformations. Another potentially harmful factor is the cost of adjusting production, which can hinder firms’ ability to reduce their polluting emissions in a timely way. In the context of a Cournot market structure, we consider competing firms that incur a cost when adjusting production and are subject to pollution emission taxes. We analyze how production adjustment costs and firms’ choice of myopic or farsighted pollution control policies affect their competitiveness and the long-run sustainability of the environmental system. We show that competition is not compatible with environmental sustainability under a myopic pollution control policy when the maximum threshold of pollution absorption has already been exceeded. Myopic policies cannot neutralize history dependency, and extremely large production adjustment costs exacerbate the problem. In contrast, farsighted pollution control policies can eliminate history-dependency as long as the tax policy is not too restrictive, though they lead to a more polluted environment than myopic policies operating below the maximum absorption efficiency threshold.