Effects of Customers' Environmental Awareness and Environmental Regulations on the Emission Intensity and Price of a Product. (15th December 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hammami, Ramzi; Nouira, Imen; Frein, Yannick
• Is Part Of: Decision sciences. Volume 49:Number 6(2018:Dec.)
• Page Start: 1116
• Page End: 1155
• Publication Date: 2017-12-15
• Subjects: Customers' Environmental Awareness -- Emission Intensity -- Environmental Regulation -- Pricing -- Production Policy -- Social Welfare; Decision making -- Periodicals; Policy sciences -- Periodicals; 658.40305
• DOI: 10.1111/deci.12302
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0011-7315

Abstract

ABSTRACT: We study the effects of customers' environmental awareness (CEA) and environmental regulations on the emission intensity and price of a product with a price‐ and carbon emission‐sensitive demand. First, we consider a continuous setting where the production policy can be adjusted to reach any desired level of emission intensity while considering either a carbon tax or a carbon cap policy. Second, we consider a discrete framework where each production policy is defined by a given amount of emission intensity, a unit production cost, and a fixed investment cost. Under both settings, we study the joint effect of CEA and environmental regulations on a firm's optimal policy. We compare the customer‐driven model (when demand is sensitive to price and emissions but without a carbon tax) to the taxation‐only model (when a carbon tax applies but demand is only sensitive to price). Our main results indicate that CEA is an efficient driver for better environmental performance, acting as a substitute for a carbon tax but, unlike a carbon tax, leading to a lower price for the customers. In addition, we demonstrate that the nonmonotonous effect of a carbon tax on production policy selection, which is a known result in the literature, is no longer valid if one considers CEA. From a social welfare perspective, we show that simultaneously increasing the carbon tax and CEA generally leads to a reduction of social welfare. We perform robustness tests and show that most of our findings are valid under different assumptions regarding demand and cost functions.