Honors Theses
Date of Award
Spring 5-9-2026
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Garrett Scott
Second Advisor
John Conlon
Third Advisor
Gregory Love
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
This Honors Capstone analyzes the influence of OPEC cartel behavior on alternative energy consumption and production. Initially, I hypothesized that OPEC quotas incentivize increased research and development into alternative and clean energy sources. Instead, my results find a weakly positive correlation between OPEC production and alternative energy consumption, which provides insight into recent studies that have determined OPEC cartel operations as inefficient relative to the profit-maximizing quantity. In conclusion, I proffer that OPEC has internalized the threat of alternative energy into its production behavior, and so the oil cartel intentionally eases its quotas to reduce the incentive of firms to invest in alternatives. As such, OPEC prolongs its dominance over the international energy market. To map this, I use R programming to conduct an entity fixed effects regression with control and instrumental variables with data from 92 countries spanning 59 years for 5,428 observations.
Recommended Citation
Sloan, Daniel P., "The Long Game: OPEC Balancing Short-Term Profit and Perpetual Market Dominance" (2026). Honors Theses. 3507.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/3507
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.