 Label wars: Competition among NGOs as sustainability standard settersJournal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2019, vol. 160, issue C, 1-18 Abstract: This paper examines competition among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that act as standard-setting organizations when firms selling labeled products have market power in the product market. We consider a double duopoly model in which NGOs compete to offer firms labels for sustainability quality and firms compete to sell vertically differentiated products. We assume that NGO preferences for standard quality levels differ, with some being quality-driven organizations and others being market-driven organizations. We find that these two NGO types must have very different preferences to be present in the label market. Moreover, competition between these two types of NGOs leads to a decrease in standards provided by the quality-driven NGO, an increase in standards provided by the market-driven NGO, and an increase in overall weighted sustainability quality. Keywords: Labels; NGOs; Vertical product differentiation; Sustainability quality (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:160:y:2019:i:c:p:1-18 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2019.02.015 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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