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An increasing concern for climate change puts pressure on industrial firms to achieve carbon emission reductions. These could be realized through cooperation among firms in industrial chains, which leads to industrial symbiosis. By taking a real options approach, we make the timing component of the investment decisions explicit. This is important in assessing the impact of carbon-reducing investment over a specific time-span. We show that a joint venture between a CO2 emitting firm and a firm that can use the CO2 will result in a higher probability that an investment in CO2 capture will take place within a specific time period, which reduces the amount of CO2 emitted substantially. We also show that, in addition to industrial symbiosis, cooperation between firms can benefit from "market symbiosis" as well, in the sense that investments are more likely to take place in markets that are positively correlated. This is an important result, given that the EU has set binding targets to its Member States for reducing their emissions.

In this paper we study a two–player investment game with a first mover advantage in continuous time with stochastic payoffs, driven by a geometric Brownian motion. One of the players is assumed to be ambiguous with max–min preferences over a strongly rectangular set of priors. We develop a strategy and equilibrium concept allowing for ambiguity and show that equilibria can be preemptive (a player invests at a point where investment is Pareto dominated by waiting) or sequential (one player invests as if she were the exogenously appointed leader). Following the standard literature, the worst–case prior for the ambiguous player if she is the second mover is obtained by setting the lowest possible trend in the set of priors. However, if the ambiguous player is the first mover, then the worst–case prior can be given by either the lowest or the highest trend in the set of priors. This novel result shows that “worst–case prior” in a setting with geometric Brownian motion and –ambiguity over the drift does not always equate to “lowest trend”.