Would Hotelling Kill the Electric Car?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Did oil companies collude to kill the electric car? If so, would this behaviour have been consistent with the optimal resource extraction model of Hotelling? In this paper, we show that the potential for endogenous technological change in alternative energy sources may greatly alter the behaviour of resource-owning firms. When technological progress in an alternative energy source can occur through learning-by-doing, resource owners face competing incentives to extract rents from the resource and to prevent expansion of the new technology. We show that in such a context, it is not the case that higher energy prices will induce alternative energy supply as resources are exhausted. Rather, we show that as we increase the learning potential in the substitute technology, lower equilibrium energy prices prevail and there may be increased emissions. We show that the effectiveness of emissions reduction policies may be altered by increased potential for technological change. Our results show that rather than harnessing the power of endogenous technological change to reduce emissions, carbon taxation may have less effect on emissions the greater is the potential for technological change. Hotelling may not have advocated killing the electric car specifically, but we show that optimal resource extraction does not imply behaviour
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".