Actions Prior to Entering an International Environmental Agreement

This paper demonstrates how expectations about the design of regimes influence countries' actions before negotiating for agreements on international environmental problems. When a country is privately informed about own reduction costs, the preagreement emission level serves as a device to signal costs. The first main result is that private information leads to an environmentally less effective situation. Second, the distortions depend on the type of regime. In particular, for high probability of high costs, distortions are lower in a uniform regime than in a differentiated regime. Hence, comparison of regimes is nontrivial when private information is added.