Foreword The Australian Greenhouse Office commissioned The Allen Consulting Group to consult with industry and other stakeholders and provide independent advice on permit allocation options under a possible national emissions trading system. This report represents The Allen Consulting Group's findings. The Australian Greenhouse Office is releasing this report in the interest of informing and pr...

Batesian mimicry is often imprecise. An underexplored explanation for imperfect mimicry is that predators might not be able to use all dimensions of prey phenotype to distinguish mimics from models and thus permit imperfect mimicry to persist. We conducted a field experiment to test whether or not predators can distinguish deadly coral snakes (Micrurus fulvius) from nonvenomous scarlet kingsnak...

Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and which have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms – uniform and discriminatory price sealed bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to tacitly or explicitly collude in order to maximiz...

This paper develops a modified system of marketable emission permits that promises both savings in abatement costs to sources and improved environmental quality relative to an initial command-and-control (CAC) outcome. Using a model of TSP emissions for the Baltimore Air Quality Control Region (AQCR), a series of simulation exercises indicates that such a permit system could generate large cost...

The allocation of permits is an important design aspect of an emissions trading scheme. Traditionally, governments have favoured the free allocation of greenhouse gas permits based on individual historical emissions (‘grandfathering’) or industry benchmark data. Particularly in the European Union (EU), the free allocation of permits has proven complex and inefficient and the distributional impl...