Social pressures, in addition to the law, incite more and more firms to pursue multiple and separate objectives. This trend raises the following question: will the change in the number of objectives pursued by firms affect their strategic interactions? To address this issue we focus on a dynamic duopoly where each firm has two objectives: one of the firms’ objectives is financial and the other is environmental. Production is a polluting activity and the actual level of pollution depends on current and past emissions. We analyze both open-loop Nash and cooperative equilibria (these equilibria are also trivially feedback as the equilibrium strategies are constant). We show that contrary to the case where firms’ unique objective is the financial one, there are Nash equilibria where production is lower than in the cooperative equilibrium. This stems from the fact that in a Nash equilibrium firms do not coordinate the choice of the relative weight given to the environmental objective. We obtain the same conclusion when firms can mitigate pollution. In this case, we also show that there are Nash equilibria where the sum of the firms’ mitigation efforts is higher than its value in the cooperative equilibrium.
This paper presents an application of new measures of research excellence, namely Hirsch's index (2005) and derived indexes. It gives a ranking of French departments of Economics, departments of Management and Business schools based on the quality of the academic environment offered by these institutions using these measures. It argues that, since the bulk of the research is done by a very small number of researchers, a greater concentration of the best researchers seems necessary for France to achieve international visibility in Economics and Management.
JEL classification: A140
We establish Pontryagin Maximum Principles in the strong form for infinite horizon optimal control problems for bounded processes, for systems governed by difference equations. Results due to Ioffe and Tihomirov are among the tools used to prove our theorems. We write necessary conditions with weakened hypotheses of concavity and without invertibility, and we provide new results on the adjoint variable. We show links between bounded problems and nonbounded ones. We also give sufficient conditions of optimality.
This paper studies a discrete-time dynamic duopoly game with homogenous goods. Both firms have to decide on investment where investment increases production capacity so that they are able to put a larger quantity on the market. The downside, however, is that a larger quantity raises pollution. The firms have multiple objectives in the sense that each one maximizes the discounted profit stream and appreciates a clean environment as well. We obtain some surprising results. First, where it is known from the continuous-time differential game literature that firms invest more under a feedback information structure compared to an open-loop one, we detect scenarios where the opposite holds. Second, in a feedback Nash equilibrium, capital stock is more sensitive to environmental appreciation than in the open-loop case.
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