This chapter considers three matters that business firms whose activities can be dangerous for human health and the environment increasingly have to deal with: public disclosure of all health and environmental risks, direct involvement of stakeholders in the management of operations, and...

The Porter Hypothesis says that well-designed environmental regulation should trigger innovations and enhance the competitiveness of firms. This paper, which follows the invitation to participate at a recent workshop financed by the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, summarizes...

We analyze the sources of persistent asymmetry between firms and between markets in a given industry. We focus on the case where some exogenous ex ante cost asymmetry can be magnified ex post in terms of cost (capabilities), market shares, prices and profit. Our model - a two-product Cournot...

This paper re-examines environmental regulation, under the assumption that pollution abatement technologies and services are provided by an imperfectly competitive environment industry. It is shown that each regulatory instrument (emission taxes and quotas; design standards; and voluntary...

New international standards for environmental auditing are now being actively promoted by public authorities and adopted by private firms. One important feature of these standards is their emphasis on managerial systems and incentives that support a wiser use of environmental resources. This...

This paper considers situations where an agent must allocate his nonobservable effort among several tasks and where several principals hold diverging viewpoints on what the best allocation should be. Economic theory currently sees each of these features as major obstacles to raising the strength...

This paper considers the threat of stricter regulation as a policy instrument to enhance innovation into cleaner technology. It is argued that in some contexts the government would find it optimal to regulate with positive probability but not with certainty. In those contexts the optimal policy...

This paper builds on the foundation laid by Oliver and Anderson (1994) and empirically tests their control instrument using two samples: sales managers and salespeople in three Canadian high-tech industries. The results reveal that the instrument is better suited to the salesperson sample and,...

This paper studies the link between environmental audits and employee compensation. The context is a one-period principal-agent relationship where the agent must allocate effort between financial and environmental tasks. The former are routinely monitored while the latter are audited (at some...

This paper proposes a formal definition of the notion of technological paradigm. This definition is consistent with the fundamental proposition of Kuhnian philosophy of science, that progress only happens through successive and abrupt shifts of paradigm. It also helps clarifying a number of...