Tradable Pollution Permits and the Regulatory Game

This paper analyzes polluters\u27 incentives to move from a traditional command and control (CAC) environmental regulatory regime to a tradable permits (TPP) regime. Existing work in environmental economics does not model how firms contest and bargain over actual regulatory implementation in CAC regimes, and therefore fail to compare TPP regimes with any CAC regime that is actually observed. This paper models CAC environmental regulation as a bargaining game over pollution entitlements. Using a reduced form model of the regulatory contest, it shows that CAC regulatory bargaining likely generates a regulatory status quo under which firms with the highest compliance costs bargain for the smallest pollution reductions, or even no reduction at all. As for a tradable permits regime, it is shown that all firms are better off under such a regime than they would be under an idealized CAC regime that set and enforced a uniform pollution standard, but permit sellers (low compliance cost firms) may actually be better off under a TPP regime with relaxed aggregate pollution levels. Most importantly, because high cost firms (or facilities) are the most weakly regulated in the equilibrium under negotiated or bargained CAC regimes, they may be net losers in a proposed move to a TPP regime. When equilibrium costs under a TPP regime are compared with equilibrium costs under a status quo CAC regime, several otherwise paradoxical aspects of firm attitudes toward TPP type reforms can be explained. In particular, the otherwise paradoxical pattern of allowances awarded under Phase II of the 1990 Clean Air Act\u27s acid rain program, a pattern tending to favor (in Phase II) cleaner, newer generating units, is explained by the fact that under the status quo regime, a kind of bargained CAC, it was the newer cleaner units that were regulated, and which therefore had higher marginal control costs than did the largely unregulated older, plants. As a normative matter, the analysis here implies that the proper baseline for evaluating TPP regimes such as those contained in the Bush Administration\u27s recent Clear Skies initiative is not idealized, but nonexistent CAC regulatory outcomes, but rather the outcomes that have resulted from the bargaining game set up by CAC laws and regulations

Barriers and Incentives to the Adoption of ISO 14001 by Firms in the United States

This paper summarizes four novel advanced antenna concepts explored in the framework of the WINNER+ project. The concepts are related to multiuser MIMO communication in cellular networks, focusing on the acquisition and application of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter in time-division-duplex (TDD) mode. The concepts include new ideas for CSI modeling and sounding for the purposes of multiuser precoding, and methods for pilot signal design with the aim to support the estimation of different CSI quantities. Furthermore, a new relaying strategy for terminal-to-terminal communication is described. All the ideas are feasible for adoption into practical upcoming communication systems such as LTE-Advanced, and most of the proposed concepts have only a minor impact on standards. Our study indicates that the CSI at its best is not only about estimating the channel responses between different antenna pairs. What counts is the nature of the intended communication link as well as the form in which CSI is applied.QC 20111102</p

Aha? Is Creativity Possible in Legal Problem Solving and Teachable in Legal Education?

This article continues and expands on my earlier project of seeking to describe how legal negotiation should be understood conceptually and undertaken behaviorally to produce better solutions to legal problems. As structured problem solving requires interests, needs and objectives identification, so too must creative solution seeking have its structure and elements in order to be effectively taught. Because research and teaching about creativity and how we think has expanded greatly since modern legal negotiation theory has been developed, it is now especially appropriate to examine how we might harness this new learning to how we might examine and teach legal creativity in the context of legal negotiation and problem solving. This article explores both the cognitive and behavioral dimensions of legal creativity and offers suggestions for how it can be taught more effectively in legal education, both within the more narrow curricula of negotiation courses and more generally throughout legal education

Meaning, Purpose, and Cause in the Law of Deception

Laws designed to affect the flow of information take many forms: rules against misrepresentation, disclosure requirements, secrecy requirements, rules governing the formatting or packaging of information, and interpretive rules designed to give people new reasons to share information. Together these and similar rules constitute the law of deception: laws that aim to prevent or cure deception. One encounters similar problems of design, function and justification throughout the law of deception. Yet very little has been written about the category as a whole. This article begins to sketch a general theory. It identifies three regulatory approaches. Interpretive laws, such as common law fraud, prohibit the making of untrue statements. These laws work by giving legal effect to commonly understood extralegal norms of interpretation and truth telling, in order to achieve specifically legal ends. Purpose-based laws, such as the tort of concealment, target acts done with a bad intent. Rather than employing an objective standard of behavior, they define the object of regulation by an actor\u27s wrongful state of mind. Finally, causal-predictive laws employ everyday folk-psychology, empirical studies or cognitive theory to predict the informational effects of narrowly described behaviors. Much consumer protection law is of the causal-predictive sort. These regulatory approaches reach different types of informationally significant behavior, are suited to different regulatory ends, and require different institutional competencies. After describing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, the article applies the theory to the Lanham Act\u27s false advertising provisions. In deciding Lanham Act cases, courts have arrived at a complex set of rules that include all three approaches. A critical analysis of those rules illustrates the theory\u27s ability both to explain the law of deception and to recommend improvements in it