When consumers are unsure of the exact standard that a quality certificate or label represents, they must infer the difficulty of the standard in part from observing which firms adopt the label. Key results from the certification and disclosure literatures are thereby altered. First, consumers...

In response to stakeholders' growing concerns, firms are joining self-regulatory environmental programs to signal their superior environmental management capabilities. In contrast to the literature's focus on programs featuring third-party certification, we theorize that programs lacking...

In many markets, governments set minimum quality standards while some sellers choose to compete on the basis of quality by exceeding them. We analyze this phenomenon using a model of vertical product differentiation, interpreting quality as an "environmental friendliness" characteristic fully...