Production agreements, sustainability investments, and consumer welfare
研究了允许企业协调产量但竞争投资的生产协议，与允许协调投资但竞争产量的可持续性协议，对投资、产出和消费者福利的不同影响。
Schinkel and Spiegel (2017) finds that allowing sustainability agreements in which firms coordinate their investments in sustainability leads to lower investments and lower output. By contrast, allowing production agreements, in which firms coordinate output yet continue to compete on investments, boosts investments in sustainability and may also benefit consumers. We extend these results to the case where investments affect not only the consumers’ willingness to pay, but also marginal cost. We show that sustainability agreements continue to lower investments and output levels, while production agreements increase investments but when they benefit consumers, they are not profitable for firms and will therefore not be formed. This implies that exempting horizontal agreements from the cartel prohibition cannot be relied on to advance sustainability goals and satisfy the competition law requirement that consumers must not be worse off.