Full Information Product Pricing: An Information Strategy for Harnessing Consumer Choice to Create a More Sustainable World

Research and practice in the information systems (IS) field have been evolving over time, nourishing and promoting the development of applications that transform the relationships of individuals, corporations, and governments. Building on this evolution, we push forward a vision of the potential influence of the IS field into one of the most important problems of our times, an increasingly unsustainable world, which is traditionally considered the product of imperfect markets or market externalities. We describe our work in Full Information Product Pricing (FIPP) and our vision of a FIPP global socio-technical system, I-Choose, as a way to connect consumer choice and values with environmental, social, and economic effects of production and distribution practices. FIPP and I-Choose represent a vision about how information systems research can contribute to interdisciplinary research in supply chains, governance, and market economies to provide consumers with information packages that help them better understand how, where, and by whom the products they buy are produced. We believe that such a system will have important implications for international trade and agreements, for public policy, and for making a more sustainable world

Building a Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure to Promote Transparent Markets

This article reports on data architecture that reduces information asymmetries to support public-private collaboration to govern product certification and inspection for promoting transparent markets and building consumer trust. The data architecture is a proof-of-concept set of data standards called the Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure Building Block (CIDIBB) for data storage, retrieval, sharing and automated reasoning of data that can be used to respond the question: what constitutes a trustworthy certification and inspection process? CIDIBB consists of three interrelated ontologies, focusing specifically on certified fair-trade coffee that has the potential to become universally applicable to any certification and inspection process for products or services. The evaluation results suggest that CIDIBB is able to test the trustworthiness of certification schemes, providing consistent results. CIDIBB will contribute to support public-private collaboration to solve public problems such as the promotion of sustainable production and fair labor practices

Using Ontologies to Develop and Test a Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure Building Block

Global markets for information-intensive products contain sharp information asymmetries that lead to market inefficiencies resulting from consumer purchasing decisions that are based on incomplete information. Elimination or reduction of such information asymmetries has long been the goal of governments as well as various nongovernmental entities that recognize that addressing issues such as sustainable production, socially just labor practices, and reduction in energy needs and health expenditure is closely linked to consumers being fully aware of the economic, environmental, and social impacts of their purchasing decisions. This chapter reports on the creation of ontology-enabled interoperable data infrastructure based on semantic technologies that would enable information sharing in traditionally information-restricted markets. The main technical result is a proof-of-concept set of data standards built on semantic technology applications and the functionalities of formal ontology of certification and inspection processes. The current proof of concept focuses specifically on certified fair-trade coffee, and while its applicability is currently limited, it has the potential to become universally applicable to any certification and inspection process for any product and service. In addition to producing a number of artifacts relevant to the expandability of the work, such as domain ontologies, the research indicates that while big data systems are necessary, they are not sufficient to create high levels of consumer trust. By testing the criteria using both hand-generated and automated queries, we are able to demonstrate that CIDIBB (Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure Building Block) is not only able to test the trustworthiness of certification schemes but also that our ontology generates consistent results

Supply-Chain transparency and governance systems: market penetration of the I-Choose system

In this chapter, we explore the impacts of key characteristics of Supply Chain Governance Systems in the development and diffusion of technology innovations that promote supply chain transparency and sustainable consumption and production. The model presented in this chapter was developed following group model building methods. Our simulation experiments reveal that the market resists “take-off” unless external financial support can be found. Additionally, “take-off” dynamics of the system are dominated by marketing budgets and external support for infrastructure. Marketing budgets drive how fast users adopt the system, and without external sponsorship of system, the final market collapses. Finally, the quality of governance—reflected in information completeness, openness, relevance and reliability, and the resultant trustworthiness of information determines final sustainable market share

Ontological Modeling of Certification and Inspection Process to Support Smart Disclosure of Product Information

The increasing number of certification schemes diminishes the utility of certifications as private regulation and creates several policy challenges. The undergoing efforts to help consumers verify the accuracy of information created by private regulation mechanisms such as certification are currently confronted with the complexities of certification and labeling systems and the difficulties in linking data points across various certification schemes. This paper presents the development of certification and inspection ontology to support smart disclosure of product information. This study proposes that the resulting ontology enables information integration and standardization thus supporting knowledge discovery and sharing by synthesizing information across disparate data sources that is valuable for informing data-driven policy formulation. The ontology also supports standardization of an agreed set of terms and semantics for currently fragmented certification and inspection schemes to support comparability across different certification schemes. The accuracy and consistency of the proposed ontology are verified by using current reasoning tools to run queries based on a set of predefined competency questions