To assess and manage reputational risks associated with supply chains, buyers are increasingly seeking information about their suppliers’ labor and environmental performance. Several voluntary programs have arisen to encourage suppliers to report this information in a standardized manner, but...

Consumers are rarely sure of the exact standard that product labels and other certificates of quality represent. We show that any such uncertainty creates a “Groucho effect” in which seeing that a product has a label leads consumers to infer that the standard for the label itself is not very...