IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tse/wpaper/127911.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Acting in the Darkness: Towards some Foundations for the Precautionary Principle

Author

Listed:
  • Guillouet, Louise
  • Martimort, David

Abstract

Invoked to guide actions under irreversibility, uncertainty and limited information, the Precautionary Principle states that decision-makers should act cautiously unless the consequences of acts are known. We consider a setting where the stock of past actions, passed a tipping point which remains unknown, increases the probability of a catastrophe. When past acts are observable, decision-makers can reconstruct the whole evolution of stock and beliefs and follow an optimal trajectory. Otherwise, and in accordance with the Precautionary Principle, they act cautiously, remaining too optimistic on their ability to delay the tipping point. This suboptimal behaviour has minor consequences on welfare.

Suggested Citation

  • Guillouet, Louise & Martimort, David, 2023. "Acting in the Darkness: Towards some Foundations for the Precautionary Principle," TSE Working Papers 23-1411, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), revised Jul 2024.
    • Handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:127911
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/wp/2023/wp_tse_1411.pdf
    File Function: Full Text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Karp, Larry, 2005. "Non-Constant Discounting in Continuous Time," Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series qt0nn1t22z, Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley.
    2. Glenn C. Loury, 1978. "The Optimal Exploitation of an Unknown Reserve," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 45(3), pages 621-636.
    3. Tsur, Yacov & Zemel, Amos, 1996. "Accounting for global warming risks: Resource management under event uncertainty," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 20(6-7), pages 1289-1305.
    4. Gollier, Christian & Jullien, Bruno & Treich, Nicolas, 2000. "Scientific progress and irreversibility: an economic interpretation of the 'Precautionary Principle'," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(2), pages 229-253, February.
    5. Kenneth J. Arrow & Anthony C. Fisher, 1974. "Environmental Preservation, Uncertainty, and Irreversibility," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Chennat Gopalakrishnan (ed.), Classic Papers in Natural Resource Economics, chapter 4, pages 76-84, Palgrave Macmillan.
    6. Ulph, Alistair & Ulph, David, 1997. "Global Warming, Irreversibility and Learning," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 107(442), pages 636-650, May.
    7. Claude Henry, 1974. "Investment decisions under uncertainty: The "irreversibility effect"," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/327343, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    8. Graciela Chichilnisky & Geoffrey Heal, 1993. "Global Environmental Risks," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 7(4), pages 65-86, Fall.
    9. Epstein, Larry G, 1980. "Decision Making and the Temporal Resolution of Uncertainty," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 21(2), pages 269-283, June.
    10. Henry, Claude, 1974. "Investment Decisions Under Uncertainty: The "Irreversibility Effect."," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 64(6), pages 1006-1012, December.
    11. Kolstad, Charles D., 1996. "Fundamental irreversibilities in stock externalities," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 221-233, May.
    12. Ekeland, Ivar & Karp, Larry & Sumaila, Rashid, 2015. "Equilibrium resource management with altruistic overlapping generations," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 1-16.
    13. Karp, L, 2007. "Non-constant discounting in continuous time," Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series qt8d52f6w7, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley.
    14. Karp, Larry, 2007. "Non-constant discounting in continuous time," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 132(1), pages 557-568, January.
    15. Karp, Larry, 2005. "Global warming and hyperbolic discounting," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(2-3), pages 261-282, February.
    16. Martimort, David & Semenov, Aggey, 2006. "Continuity in mechanism design without transfers," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 93(2), pages 182-189, November.
    17. Chichilnisky, Graciela & Heal, Geoffrey & Beltratti, Andrea, 1995. "The Green Golden Rule," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 49(2), pages 175-179, August.
    18. Miller, Jon R & Lad, Frank, 1984. "Flexibility, learning, and irreversibility in environmental decisions: A bayesian approach," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 161-172, June.
    19. Giovanni Immordino, 2000. "Self-Protection, Information and the Precautionary Principle," The Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics (The Geneva Association), vol. 25(2), pages 179-187, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pablo Garcia-Sanchez & Olivier Pierrard, 2023. "Uncertain Lifetime, Health Investment And Welfare," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 2023020, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Martimort, David & Guillouet, Louise, 2020. "Precaution, Information and Time-Inconsistency: On The Value of the Precautionary Principle," CEPR Discussion Papers 15266, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Karp, Larry & Zhang, Jiangfeng, 2006. "Regulation with anticipated learning about environmental damages," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 259-279, May.
    3. May Elsayyad & Florian Morath, 2016. "Technology Transfers For Climate Change," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 57(3), pages 1057-1084, August.
    4. Giovanni Immordino, 2003. "Looking for a Guide to Protect the Environment: The Development of the Precautionary Principle," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 17(5), pages 629-644, December.
    5. Ingham, Alan & Ma, Jie & Ulph, Alistair, 2007. "Climate change, mitigation and adaptation with uncertainty and learning," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(11), pages 5354-5369, November.
    6. Courbage, Christophe & Rey, Béatrice & Treich, Nicolas, 2013. "Prevention and precaution," TSE Working Papers 13-445, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    7. Robert S. Pindyck, 2006. "Uncertainty In Environmental Economics," NBER Working Papers 12752, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Claude Henry & Marc Henry, 2002. "Formalization and applications of the Precautionary Principle," Working Papers hal-00243001, HAL.
    9. Narain, Urvashi & Hanemann, W. Michael & Fisher, Anthony C., 2004. "The Temporal Resolution of Uncertainty and the Irreversibility Effect," Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series qt7nn328qg, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley.
    10. Attanasi, Giuseppe Marco & Montesano, Aldo, 2010. "Testing Value vs Waiting Value in Environmental Decisions under Uncertainty," TSE Working Papers 10-154, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    11. Narain, Urvashi & Hanemann, W. Michael & Fisher, Anthony C, 2007. "The irreversibility effect in environmental decisionmaking," Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series qt7bc5t8cf, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley.
    12. van den Bergh, Jeroen C.J.M., 2008. "Optimal diversity: Increasing returns versus recombinant innovation," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 68(3-4), pages 565-580, December.
    13. Charles Kolstad & Alistair Ulph, 2011. "Uncertainty, Learning and Heterogeneity in International Environmental Agreements," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 50(3), pages 389-403, November.
    14. Meglena Jeleva & Stéphane Rossignol, 2019. "Optimists, Pessimists, and the Precautionary Principle," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 74(1), pages 367-396, September.
    15. Lontzek, Thomas S. & Narita, Daiju, 2009. "The effect of uncertainty on decision making about climate change mitigation: a numerical approach of stochastic control," Kiel Working Papers 1539, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    16. Karp, Larry S. & Tsur, Yacov, 2007. "Climate Policy When the Distant Future Matters: Catastrophic Events with Hyperbolic Discounting," CUDARE Working Papers 7186, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
    17. Geoffrey Heal & Bengt Kriström, 2002. "Uncertainty and Climate Change," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 22(1), pages 3-39, June.
    18. Narain, Urvashi & Hanemann, Michael & Fisher, Anthony C., 2002. "Uncertainty, Learning, and the Irreversibility Effect," CUDARE Working Papers 198691, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
    19. van Wijnbergen, Sweder & Willems, Tim, 2015. "Optimal learning on climate change: Why climate skeptics should reduce emissions," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 17-33.
    20. Laurent Gilotte & Michel de Lara, 2005. "Precautionary Effect and Variations of the Value of Information," Working Papers 2005.28, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Precautionary Principle; Environmental Risk; Tipping Point; Uncertainty and Irreversibility;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • Q55 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Technological Innovation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:127911. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tsetofr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.