STOPPING RULES AND THE CONTROL OF STOCK POLLUTANTS

A stock pollutant is defined as a residual waste that might accumulate over time. This paper examines some of the important distinctions between degradable and nondegradable stock pollutants and between nondegradable stock pollutants with known versus uncertain environmental cost. The latter case is examined using the more recent literature on stochastic control with Brownian motion. The presence of irreversibility and uncertainty is known to lead to more conservative investment rules and places a value on the preservation of options. In the case of a nondegradable stock pollutant with Brownian environmental cost, options are preserved by stopping accumulation at a lower level than in the corresponding certainty‐equivalent problem. The model presented in this paper permits the derivation of closed‐form stopping rules. For a simple numerical problem, the optimal nondegradable stock with Brownian environmental cost was 20 to 45 percent lower than the optimal level with known environmental cost. The empirical study of an actual nondegradable stock pollutant will require time series data on private and social cost in order to estimate drift and variance parameters which will influence the actual extent to which the optimal stock is less than the certainty‐equivalent stock.