No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to find the optimal environmental quality criteria for a strategic eco-labeling authority with three objectives (i.e. maximizing the aggregate environmental quality, maximizing the industry profit and maximizing the social welfare). Particularly, the authors investigate how the existence of imperfectly informed consumers affects labeling criteria determination and competition among firms. Design/methodology/approach A game-theoretic modeling approach was adopted in this paper. A three-stage sequential game was modeled and backward induction was used to solve for a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. To investigate the impacts of the existence of imperfectly informed consumers, the equilibrium, if all consumers are perfectly informed of the eco-label, was studied as a benchmark. Findings A more strict eco-labeling criterion improves revenues for both the labeled and unlabeled firms. It is interesting to find that the eco-labeling criteria to maximize industry profits are stricter than the criteria to maximize social welfare. Moreover, when the fraction of imperfectly informed consumers increases, the eco-labeling criteria to maximize aggregate environmental quality or industry profits will be more strict, while the criteria to maximize the social welfare will be looser. Originality/value The authors analyze the equilibrium strategies for firms against the eco-labeling criteria certified by authority with different objectives. The obtained optimal labeling strategies could provide insightful guidelines for the certifying authority to select the best suitable labeling criteria to achieve its goals.

The articleaims to explore the role of horizontal product differentiation in promoting/hindering firm's participation in environmental certification. To this purpose, we consider a differentiated duopoly model where firms compete in both prices and environmental qualities. The result shows that when the level of horizontal differentiation relative to the degree of vertical differentiation is sufficiently high, only the symmetric equilibrium where both firms choose to or both choose not to certify their products exists. Asymmetric equilibrium (vertical dominance equilibrium) occurs when the level of horizontal differentiation relative to the degree of vertical differentiation is sufficiently low.