Competing or complementary labels? Estimating spillovers in Chinese green building certification
Many markets have several voluntary certification programs that sellers can use to signal product or organizational quality. Although many scholars emphasize the potential for competition between labels, we argue that there can be positive spillovers in adoption of “competing” certification schemes and propose a framework for understanding how those spillovers arise through three channels: suppliers, adopters, and audience. Managers of nascent certification programs can use this framework as a roadmap for attracting various stakeholder groups. We use our framework to analyze the diffusion of Chinese green-building labels and find evidence of large positive spillovers through the supplier and audience channels. These results suggest that the risks of tipping toward a single standard may be small in practice.
