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 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...

This paper considers the information systems induced by auditing policies in a principal- agent model with moral hazard. We point out that two such information systems A and B are seldom comparable using the customary mean-preserving spread relation between their respective likelihood ratio...

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 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...

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...

Pollution abatement goods and services are now largely being delivered by a specialized “eco-industry.” This note reconsiders Pigouvian taxes in this context. We find that the optimal emission tax will depart from the marginal social cost of pollution according to the polluters’ and the...