Menus of price-quantity contracts for inducing the truth in environmental regulation

Many authors have proposed mechanisms to induce regulated polluting firms to truthfully reveal their private information. This paper proposes an alternative scheme in which the regulator offers each firm a menu of linear price-quantity contracts; faced with this menu, each firm's dominant strategy is to truthfully report its private information and self-select the contract that is ex post efficient. The proposed menu schedule that is more elastic than the firm's residual marginal damage function engenders a positive quantity effect, thereby counterbalancing the firm's incentive to misreport prompted by the linearity of price. Due to its built-in price quantity structure, the scheme performs as designed regardless of the elasticities of marginal damage and demand functions. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.