We study a firm's decisions to engage in socially responsible activities, voluntarily report on them and purchase external assurance of the report. In our signaling model, neither firm type nor the level of activity is observed. We show that if voluntary assurance is not too expensive, the firm...

In many situations, one party can monitor a second party and chooses how much monitoring to do. However, in many of these situations, monitoring by other parties can (imperfectly) substitute for monitoring by the first party. As a result, the first party may attempt to "free ride" on the...

We model firms as competing for socially responsible consumers by linking the provision of a public good (environmentally friendly or socially responsible activities) to sales of their private goods. In many cases, too little of the public good is provided but under certain conditions,...

Engaging in environmentally friendly practices and then informing the public through advertising or on the product packaging is known as ecolabeling. In this paper, we examine how effective this type of competition among firms is as a means of privately providing a public good (environmental...

We model firms as competing for socially responsible consumers by linking the provision of a public good (environmentally friendly or socially responsible activities) to sales of their private goods. In many cases, too little of the public good is provided, but under certain conditions,...