What Contributes to a High Satisfaction of Report Publishers? An Approach with a Bayesian Belief Network

The evidence of social and ecological responsibility has gained importance in the forest product industry. Sustainability Reporting could be seen an approach, which is able to capture effort and success of enterprises not only within financial dimension. New types of multidimensional reports have been developed in the last decade. However, little is known about reasons for the restrictive use of the new report types and it remains open if the new types are applicable in the forest products industries. Therefore, in order to gain deeper knowledge in this respect a survey was conducted involving 400 forest products enterprises located in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Special attention was given to attitudinal and behavioural questions. Furthermore, results were analyzed with a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) which helped to detect the key components that can explain the various level of satisfaction with reporting. As the results indicated, generally low satisfaction with the present reporting was concluded. Moreover, the BBN based sensitivity analysis provided evidence that (e.g.) a positive attitude towards new reporting standards and the publication of such new multidimensional reports increases the utility perceived significantly. On the other hand, strong negative influence was found for the publication of traditional report-types. Hence, BBN proved to be a feasible approach to explain the inner relationships and its explanatory power. General recommendations for the future reporting in the forest product sector can be deduced.