The Incentive to Invest in Environmental-Friendly Technologies: Dynamics Makes a Difference

The established view on oligopolistic competition with environmental externalities has it that, since firms neglect the external effect, their incentive to invest in R&D for pollution abatement is nil unless they are subject to some form of environmental taxation. We take a dynamic approach to this issue, using a simple differential game to show that the conclusion reached by the static literature is not robust, as the introduction of dynamics shows that firms do invest in R&D for environmental-friendly technologies throughout the game. Moreover, our setup also illustrates the existence of multiple equilibria, only one of which is identified by the corresponding static game.