Green and guilty: The interplay of environmental quality and greenwashing
研究了环保意识消费者如何受企业绿色洗白影响，发现绿色洗白与真实环保投资互补，消费者精明程度提高会减少两者，且产品替代性影响垄断与双寡头企业的策略差异。
We develop a model with environmentally-conscious consumers whose utility depends on their perception of imperfectly observable firms’ environmental investments, and consumers differ in their level of sophistication. Firms can engage in greenwashing, i.e, in sending a costly message overstating their level of actual investments. We show that in equilibrium firms engage in greenwashing, and that greenwashing is complement to authentic green investments, rationalizing the available empirical evidence. We also show that both greenwashing and genuine investment decrease when consumers’ sophistication increases, and that a two product monopolist induces less (more) greenwashing and actual investments than two single product duopolists when products are substitutes (complements). Our findings imply a novel tradeoff between policies aimed at discouraging greenwashing or at fostering consumers’ awareness and the equilibrium level of genuine environmental investments.