Abstract

Efficient regulation of the commons requires information about the regulated firms that is rarely available to regulators (e.g., cost of pollution abatement). Montero (2008) proposes a simple mechanism for inducing firms to truthfully reveal their private information: a uniform price sealed-bid auction of an endogenous number of (transferable) licenses with a fraction of the auction revenues given back to firms. This paper discuses further properties of the mechanism including its extension to the possibility of private externalities and non-transferability of licences