استفاده از بازرسی های محیطی در پایش محیطی و اجرای قانون هنگامی که سازمان بازرسی نمی تواند خود دست به ارتکاب احتمال های بازرسی اعلام شده بزند

We consider a game between two polluting firms and an inspection agency, which can inspect ambient pollution levels before inspecting individual firms, but without committing itself to announced inspection probabilities. Without ambient inspections, we have a unique equilibrium. With ambient inspections, we obtain several equilibria, depending on the relative values of the environmental cost of noncompliance and the cost of inspecting firms. In the most relevant equilibrium, the higher the fine for noncompliance and the lower the environmental cost of noncompliance by the firms, the more likely that expected costs for the inspection agency will be lower with ambient inspections.

In this paper, we have considered a game between 2 polluting firms and an inspection agency which cannot commit itself to announced inspection probabilities but which can use ambient inspections to improve the efficiency of its policy. The main results are thus (ignoring the limiting cases): (1) When the cost of inspecting one firm is higher than the environmental benefit of bringing one noncompliant firm in compliance, the agency will never inspect a firm and the firms will never comply, with or without ambient inspections. It is then better not to have ambient inspections. (2) When the environmental benefit of bringing a noncompliant firm in compliance is larger than the cost of inspecting one firm but smaller than the cost of inspecting two firms, we have a unique mixed strategy equilibrium without ambient inspections. The agency’s expected costs are independent from the level of the fine. With ambient inspections, there are three mixed-strategies perfect Bayesian equilibria. In all these equilibria, an infinite fine allows us to obtain perfect compliance by the firms. The observation of ambient pollution levels allows the agency to avoid unnecessary firm inspection costs. This implies that, all other things being equal, the higher the fine for noncompliance, the more likely that the agency’s expected costs will be lower with ambient inspections. (3) When the environmental benefit of bringing a noncompliant firm in compliance is larger than the cost of inspecting both firms, we have an infinite number of perfect Bayesian equilibria where both firms always comply if there are ambient inspections, and this occurs independently from the level of the fine. Arguably the most interesting result is that ambient inspections combined with infinite fines are a perfect substitute for pre-commitment to inspection probabilities: they allow the agency to announce inspection probabilities that are always optimal ex post and will therefore never need to be carried out in equilibrium.On the other hand, we have used some rather restrictive assumptions in our model, which immediately suggests some possible extensions for further research: • We have assumed throughout the analysis that the firms perfectly control their decision variable. This is plausible with technology standards,16 but not with emission standards. • In reality, measurements of ambient inspections are bound to be very imprecise. An interesting extension could be to consider a model where the abatement technology chosen by the firms only determines the probability distribution of ambient inspections. Other, possibly very complex, extensions could consider interactive pollutants or pollutants that are not dispersed uniformly into the environment. • We have assumed here that there is one single environmental quality variable to monitor. However, in reality, an agency must decide which environmental laws and which regions should receive the highest priority in its enforcement effort. Ambient inspections could then be used by the agency to allocate its budget more efficiently. • In our analysis, ambient inspections are used to monitor firm performance. Alternatively, the government could delegate the conduct of ambient inspections to another agency, who would use them to monitor the enforcement agency’s performance (this has already been suggested by Cohen and Rubin [5]). Ambient inspections could then also be used as a basis for “yardstick competition” between several enforcement agencies. • It could also be interesting to extend this analysis to other contexts. For instance, ambient inspections are an indicator of aggregate environmental performance. One could however also think of a tax collector who only starts auditing individual taxpayers in a given area if global tax collections fall below a given threshold.