Abstract: The impact of regulations on the cost of pollution reduction is affected by the characteristics of regulatory instrument and the cost structure of enterprises, which leads to different decision-making results of pollution control. This paper firstly constructs a theoretical model based on the profit maximization to analyze the impact of price regulation and quantitative regulation on the selection of the kind of green technology innovations for enterprises. And then the nested logit model is used to test the impact of environmental regulation instruments on the preference of green technology innovation. The findings are as follows. (1) price-based regulations are beneficial to end-treatment of pollution, while quantitative regulation tends to reduce pollutant production by reducing output. When considering green technology innovation, the emission reduction effect of environmental regulations is affected by the improvement of green technology. (2) Different types of environmental regulation instruments have heterogeneous effects on the choice of green technology innovation. Price-based regulation tools are more conducive to reducing pollution emissions through the introduction of pollution control technology, while quantity-based regulations and command-based regulations are inclined to bring about more green production technology innovation. (3) The regional difference of price-based environmental regulation is the most obvious, while the imperative regulatory regulations only have regional heterogeneity of impact degree, and have no influence on bias heterogeneity. The regional heterogeneities of various influencing factors and the environmental regulation instruments ultimately result from the trade-off between the marginal cost and the marginal utility of enterprises in pollution control.

Key words: internalization of environmental cost, environmental regulation, green technology innovation