Mireille Chiroleu Assouline

How do environmental information and awareness interact to improve environmental quality by changing consumer behavior and firm strategies? This article provides theoretical insights using an original differentiation model within a general framework whose specific cases have been studied previously. On the demand side, only informed consumers differentiate brown from green product quality, while uninformed consumers consider these perfect substitutes. Moreover, all informed consumers value the green product and devalue the brown product as a result of an aversion effect but are heterogeneous in their environmental awareness. On the supply side, two firms offer different environmental qualities and compete on price. We consider two types of environmental campaigns: one that increases the number of informed consumers and one that increases the environmental awareness of informed consumers. We show that these campaigns crucially determine three market configurations: segmented; fragmented, with a brown product that appeals to both uninformed consumers and a fraction of informed consumers; and covered. Assuming that the greenest consumer behavior is abstention, we find that both campaigns do not always lead to better environmental quality; that is, a situation in which all consumers are informed and some highly environmentally aware is not necessarily the greenest situation. Depending on the aversion effect, the budget of the campaign organizer, and their relative cost-effectiveness, information and awareness-raising campaigns must be carefully combined to achieve the best possible environmental quality.

Environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly using strategies to encourage firms to eliminate product components (e.g., palm oil) that are harmful to the environment (e.g., rainforests) or to replace them with NGO‐certified sustainable components. Under what conditions do NGOs’ information and ecolabeling strategies succeed in eliminating certain harmful components when these components contribute to the intrinsic quality of a product? The paper addresses these questions using a model of two‐dimensional vertical product differentiation in a market with consumers either informed or uninformed about the environmental quality of products and two firms that initially offer a product with the harmful component and a harmful component‐free product. We show that the information campaign plays a crucial and effective role in improving environmental quality, although the optimal share of informed consumers for the NGO is large but not always 100%. Ecolabeling cannot replace the information campaign. It is only a complementary tool to an intensive information campaign. Used together, they can succeed in triggering the substitution of the certified sustainable component for the harmful one.

L’urgence climatique n’est plus à démontrer : il est aujourd’hui nécessaire de modifier, pour les décarboner, toutes nos activités pro­ductives, nos métiers, et de réduire l’impact global de nos économies sur l’environnement. Cette transition d’ampleur est alternativement présentée comme le moyen de parvenir à une croissance verte créa­trice de richesses, ou comme un processus porteur d’une inévitable régression économique. Dépassant cette lecture clivée, Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline brosse un état des connaissances sur les effets de la transition énergétique, et plus largement écologique, en matière d’emploi. Elle montre que ce travail d’identification est un préalable indispensable à la mise en place de politiques macroéconomiques et d’accompagnement pour parvenir à une transition juste, qui ne s’accomplit pas aux dépens des personnes travaillant aujourd’hui dans les secteurs les plus polluants.

We explore differences in firms’ attitudes towards corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using a unique dataset covering 8,857 French firms, collected by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), we identify firms conducting conscious CSR and others with effective but unaware CSR activities. We then construct three CSR pillar scores for each firm, using Mokken scale analysis, a form of non-parametric item response analysis. The CSR scores, along with responses to specific questions, allow us to characterize firms that implement conscious or unaware CSR. We then estimate simple probit and count data models to show that a significant share of firms are in fact actually engaged in unaware CSR, with no monotonic size effect. Cooperation with external actors such as NGOs mitigates the effect of firm size on the likelihood of conducting unaware CSR, while the effect of NGO campaigns against large firms is mainly to increase the environmental score of small firms in the same industry.