2023年12月19日，伟易博行为科学与政策干预交织立异团队乐成举行2023年秋季学期第五期（总第十八次）行为科学分享会。本次讲座约请到厦门大学经济学院财务系副教授、王亚南经济研究院研究员李智博士，带来题为“Emissions Trading with Consignment Auctions: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment”的研究分享。
分享人 The Speaker
Zhi Li is an associate professor at Department of Public Finance, School of Economics and the Wang Yanan Institutes for Studies in Economics, Xiamen University. He obtained Ph.D in Economics from University of Washington (Seattle). He uses game theory and economic experiments to design and test novel economic mechanisms with applications in public economics and resource and environmental economics.
Currently, he is focusing on the design of voluntary provision mechanisms for local and global public goods, environmental markets for carbon allowances and credits, and water markets. His research has been published in Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Environmental and Resource Economics, PLOS ONE, etc. He is an associate editor for Resource and Energy Economics, and a committee member of China Emissions Trading Association (CETA) in the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences (CSES).
分享会 The Seminar
With a unique opportunity of recruiting hundreds of emissions trading system (ETS) participants in a series of lab-in-the-field experiments, we compare a revenue-neutral consignment auction (CA) with free allocation (grandfathering, GF hereafter) and a uniform price auction (UPA) as alternative permit allocation designs. In our setup, firms first receive their permits for free. Then, under the two auction mechanisms, they need to buy back a share of the permits, either with auction revenues returned to the firms in the primary market (CA) or not returned (UPA), followed by a spot (secondary) market for all mechanisms with the continuous double auction. We find that enforced permit transactions in the primary market induce a higher price, facilitating price discovery with lower volatility and more effective trading in the spot market. Both auctions reduce non-compliance compared with GF, because the auctions reduce both permit hoarding and risky over-selling in the spot market. Both CA and UPA help smaller polluting firms lower their profit risks. CA also helps large, cleaner firms increase profits. Our results provide insights on permit allocation designs when introducing an ETS, especially for developing countries that are pondering the balance between market efficiency and firms’ cost burden.
