The Fox River scheme in Wisconsin, under which rights to discharge water pollutants into the Fox River could be traded, is a well cited example of pollution trading failure due to the high transaction costs. Only one trade took place at the initial stages of this scheme. Hahn and Hester (1989) explain that the main reasons of this no-trade situation were the prohibition on trading within a firm, trading barriers from the regulator's side, the limited life of the rights, and the high administrative requirements.

The lead permit-trading programme aimed at reducing the amount of lead added to gasoline and experienced high trading levels. The minimal administrative requirements from the regulatory side, the well-established markets, the possibility to conduct intra and inter firm trades, the homogeneity of participants, the previous trading experience of most participants, and the ease in finding trading partners were the major factors explaining its success (Hahn and Hester, 1989, Gangadharan, 2000). Despite the success of this programme, Kerr and Maré (1998) in their empirical investigation find that transaction costs in this programme were significant for first-trade transactions $ ^{24} $ which account for around 10-20 percent of loss in cost effectiveness. These losses were highest for refineries in firms with few refineries and for refineries in small firms.

In stark contrast to the lead trading programme, the RECLAIM, initiated to reduce smog creating pollutant in Los Angeles, encompassed firms with different industrial structure participating in different input and output markets. Gangadharan (2000) empirically measures whether the presence of transaction costs affected trading probabilities within RECLAIM. Her study concludes that, without transaction costs, the probability of trading would increase by 32 percent in 1995 and by 12 percent in 1996 suggesting that these costs are more significant in the early stages of the programme, and then decrease as the market matures and participants learn how to trade (Cason and Gangadharan, 2003).

The US market for trading $ SO_{2} $ emissions is considered the most successful large scale trading scheme. Transaction costs were mentioned as one of the preconditions that could explain the low trading activity and the low allowance price (relative to what ex ante work had expected) in the initial phase of this programme (Burtraw, 1996). However, Conrad and Kohn (1996, p. 1051) conclude that “transaction costs and regulatory uncertainty have not significantly affected the price of allowances”. The brokerage fees – a proxy for trading transaction costs – were estimated to be less than 2 percent of the prevailing spot price (Joskow et al., 1998). The low transaction costs of allowance trading are explained by the anonymity of market participants, the existence of active brokers, and no restrictions from the government on when and how to trade the assigned rights (Ellerman et al., 2005, Joskow et al., 1998, Solomon, 1999). Firms’ homogeneity (only electricity generating units), and the number of participants might be other ingredients explaining the programme’s success.

The UK ETS was the world's first economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme. The scheme’s participants noted that monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) procedures were the most time-consuming requirements of the scheme, while brokers had a minimum floor for the volume of a trade, some charging a minimum arrangement fee which could make the transaction costs associated with small trades prohibitive (ENVIROS, 2006).