The present paper proposes a framework for examining whether a food production enterprise, attempting to build an ecocertification strategy, connects the creation of environmental value with the creation of economic value, balancing environmental sustainability with economic sustainability. More specifically, the paper combines demand theory with a discreet choice consumers’ model in an embryonic ecocertified food market, to examine whether economic value is created and to identify the determinants of this value creation. An empirical investigation of the model using consumer data indicates that a variety of factors, such as consumer’s age and profession, family’s income and purchasing strategy, product quality association in consumers’ mind and the retailing outlet, play an important role in shaping the respondents’ intention to pay for the ecofriendliness of products. The proposed framework can help enterprise management to balance the consumers’ and enterprise owners’ claims in cases where certification schemes or standards exist that enable enterprises to communicate social responsibility to their customers. 1. Introduction The corporate environmental behavior evolves from a regulation-driven reactive mode to a proactive approach, since firms that adopt proactive environmental management strategies become more efficient and competitive [1]. This transition in business thinking from a reactive to a more proactive approach reveals operations, systems, processes, and actions that yield environmentally responsible products and services as outputs. Thus, enterprise management needs methods enabling it to develop innovative products and services that contribute to environmental protection and social welfare, without eroding the firm’s viability. Since the existing methodologies have been criticized as reactive rather than proactive [2, 3], enterprises need new methodological tools for designing strategies and building environmentally responsible organizations efficiently. In some cases, the proactive policies of environmentally responsible enterprises focus on adopting ecocertification/ecolabeling schemes. These schemes emerged as important market-based mechanisms aimed at internalizing the externalities generated throughout the supply chain, by aligning private incentives with social values attached to natural resources and the environment [4, 5]. In these new ecocertified/ecolabeled products markets (embryonic markets), if consumers recognize the ecolabels and trust the information, they might be willing to pay price premiums for certified products
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