The last couple of decades have seen the emergence of several labels, many of which certify a higher environmental quality to appeal to customers with environmentally friendly tastes. Existing eco‐labels present different standards and different levels of uptake. Often, there is a trade off between these two dimensions: the eco‐label sponsor anticipates that if a standard is too stringent, fewer producers are likely to adopt it. This article looks at the standard that is optimally chosen to solve this trade off, depending on whether the eco‐label sponsor is a non‐governmental organization that aims at reducing emissions, an industry association that wants to maximize total profits, or a government that cares about consumer surplus. In order to compute the eco‐label adoption rate in an oligopoly, we extend the classical model of vertical differentiation to a scenario with more than two producers. When optimally choosing their standard, the non‐governmental organization chooses the most ambitious one, the government chooses the least ambitious one, and the industry association chooses a standard in between.

中文翻译：

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寡头垄断环境中的最佳生态标签标准

在过去的几十年里，出现了几个标签，其中许多都证明了更高的环境质量，以吸引具有环保品味的客户。现有的生态标签呈现出不同的标准和不同的吸收水平。通常，在这两个维度之间存在权衡：生态标签发起人预计，如果标准过于严格，采用它的生产商可能会减少。本文着眼于解决这种权衡的最佳选择标准，具体取决于生态标签发起人是旨在减少排放的非政府组织、希望实现总利润最大化的行业协会还是政府关心消费者剩余。为了计算寡头垄断中的生态标签采用率，我们将垂直分化的经典模型扩展到具有两个以上生产者的场景。在最佳选择标准时，非政府组织选择雄心勃勃的标准，政府选择雄心勃勃的标准，行业协会选择介于两者之间的标准。