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Life cycle cost (LCC) computations are a well-established instrument for the evaluation of intertemporal choices in organizations, but they have not been widely adopted by private consumers yet. Consumer investment decisions for products and services with higher initial costs and lower operating costs are potentially subject to numerous cognitive biases, such as present-biased preferences or framing effects. This article suggests a classification for categorizing different cost profiles for eco-innovation and a conceptual model for the influence of LCC information on consumer decisions regarding eco-innovation. It derives hypotheses on the decision-making process for eco-innovation from a theoretical perspective. To verify the hypotheses, the publication reviews empirical studies evaluating the effects of LCC information on consumer investment decisions. It can be concluded that rather than finding ways to make customers pay more for environmentally sound products, the marketing challenge for eco-innovation should be reconceptualized as one of lowering customers' perceived initial cost and increasing awareness of LCC. Most existing studies report a positive effect of LCC information on the purchase likelihood of eco-innovations. Disclosing LCC information provides an important base for long-term thinking on the individual, corporate, and policy levels.

As the focus of environmental policy and management shifts from cleaner production at the process level towards greener products as a whole, stakeholders ask for transparency throughout the entire value chain. This article assesses the comprehensiveness and the value of currently reported quantitative environmental disclosures of 97 listed companies from the automotive, banking, pharmaceutical and electronic hardware sectors. Findings indicate that quantitative environmental disclosures have many limitations, including incompleteness and inconsistency regarding corporate activities and sites, and limited internal data coherence. For many sectors, corporate disclosures only cover a very small share of the total environmental burden of products. A stepwise procedure is proposed to verify and improve the quality and completeness of reporting using life cycle approaches. We present simple data quality tests, and we introduce the concept of the environmental infl uence matrix, which provides a solid basis for the identifi cation and prioritization of key performance indicators and areas of action.sustainability reports are one way to meet stakeholders' needs for corporate environmental information, and they provide evidence of corporate sustainability assessments. There are other sources such as environmental labels and product declarations (ISO 14020 series), life cycle assessments (ISO 14040 series), pollutant release and transfer registries (e.g. the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER)) and macro-evaluations of industry sectors (e.g. . While complementary, these sources are rarely combined, probably because of their different scopes (products versus company versus sector) and target groups. We suggest combining these approaches in a consistent evaluation framework to increase the quality and reliability of current corporate environmental evaluation and disclosure. This article addresses both stakeholders' interests in the quantitative evaluation of the corporate environmental performance and the interests of managers in new concepts and tools to improve environmental self-evaluation and company disclosure. The article proposes a stepwise procedure based on life cycle approaches to verify and improve the quality and comprehensiveness of quantitative corporate environmental disclosure. It illustrates the approach by analyzing the disclosures of large companies from four sectors and also shows how to improve it.

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