Optimal Environmental Radical Activism

We study the problem faced by activists who want to maximize …rms'compliance with high environmental standards. Our focus is on radical activism which relies on non-violent civil disobedience. Disruptive actions and the threat thereof are used to force …rms to concede i.e., to engage in self-regulation. We address the optimal use of scarce activist resources in face of incomplete information by looking at a general mechanism, directly adapted from Myerson's (1981) optimal auction theory. The characterization informs that the least vulnerable and most polluting …rms should be targeted with disruptive actions while the others are granted a guarantee not to be targeted in exchange for a concession. This characterization allows studying the determinants of the activist's strength and how it is a¤ected by repression, a central feature for civil disobedience. We …nd that optimal radical activism is relatively resilient to repression. In an extension that accounts for asymmetry between …rms'abatement cost, we …nd that the mechanism optimizes the allocation of abatment efforts and creates incentives for innovation. We discuss some other welfare properties of optimal activism