Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Standardization And The Impacts Of Voluntary Program Participation: Evidence From Environmental Auditing, Mary F. Evans, Lirong Liu, Sarah L. Stafford

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

We explore how limits to our insight about the underlying decision-making structure of firms may affect the conclusions we draw about the likely impacts of participation in voluntary environmental programs. We develop a theoretical model to examine the conditions under which a multi-facility firm chooses to employ a standardized adoption policy for a voluntary program. We test this model empirically using a firm-level dataset on the adoption of a voluntary environmental auditing program and find that, consistent with the theoretical model, a standardized auditing outcome is less likely among firms with more heterogeneous portfolios of facilities. We also examine the …