The regulation of environmental risks increasingly emphasizes the awareness and empowerment of stakeholders. The success of this approach, however, seems to depend crucially on the quality of environmental disclosures. In this paper we investigate the amount and quality of the information that would be voluntarily delivered to some stakeholder by a potential polluter. We find that information may be hazier when the stakeholder is confident (or naive) a priori, the cost of analyzing the received reports increases little with their complexity, or a polluter's net expected payoff from undertaking an industrial activity that would turn out to be unsafe is small. A worried stakeholder and a low cost of producing more accurate figures, on the other hand, may favor disclosure of high-quality information. By delivering information of very good quality, safe firms can set themselves apart more easily from the dangerous ones the higher the relative ex post payoff from their current industrial activity. The implications of this framework for the scope and design of public programs of environmental disclosure are briefly examined.
La réglementation des risques environnementaux met de plus en plus l'accent sur l'information et la responsabilisation des parties prenantes. Le succès de cette approche repose toutefois largement sur la qualité de l'information fournie par les entreprises visées. Cet article porte sur la quantité et la qualité de l'information qui serait volontairement fournie à une partie prenante par un pollueur potentiel. On trouve que cette information sera moins précise lorsque la partie prenante est confiante (voire naïve) a priori, que le coût d'analyse de l'information livrée croît avec la complexité de celle-ci, ou que le revenu attendu par une entreprise se révélant être en non conformité est petit. En revanche, une partie prenante inquiète et un faible coût de production de données précises encouragent la livraison d'une information de meilleure qualité. La précision de l'information livrée permet à une firme sûre de se distinguer d'autant plus facilement d'une firme dangereuse que son revenu ex post est relativement plus élevé. À la lumière de notre modèle, on examine en terminant plusieurs principes se rapportant au design des programmes publics de révélation des risques à la santé et à l'environnement.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
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