Risk aversion in modeling of cap-and-trade mechanism and optimal design of emission markets

Abstract

According to theoretical arguments, a properly designed emission trading system should help reaching pollution reduction at low social burden based on the theoretical work of environmental economists, cap-and-trade systems are put into operations all over the world. However, the practice from emissions trading yields a real stress test for the underlying theory and reveals a number of its weak points. This paper aims to fill the gap between general welfare concepts underlying understanding of liberalized market and specific issues of real-world emission market operation. In our work, we present a novel technique to analyze emission market equilibrium in order to address diverse questions in the setting of risk-averse market players. Our contribution significantly upgrades all existing models in this field, which neglect risk-aversion aspects at the cost of having a wide range of singularities in their conclusions, now resolved in our approach. Furthermore, we show both how the architecture of an environmental market can be optimized under the realistic assumption of risk-aversion.