The information problem

People are increasingly asked to make responsible choices as consumers, but they are often asked to do so without access to the same information as producers, sellers, platforms, certifiers, or watchdogs. Our initiative studies this problem as an information challenge: not only what people care about, but what they can actually find, compare, trust, and use when they shop.

1. What is this problem and why it matters in shopping

The problem of information asymmetries in responsible consumption starts from a simple imbalance: some actors know much more than others. Producers may know how goods were sourced, how workers were treated, or what environmental harms were involved. Retailers and platforms may know how product information is structured, ranked, and displayed. Certifiers and watchdogs may hold evidence that never reaches ordinary shoppers in a usable form. Consumers, meanwhile, are still expected to make “better” choices.

The issue is not only that information is missing. Important information is often fragmented, buried, hard to verify, strategically framed, or difficult to compare across products and sellers. A product may look sustainable because of a label, a green claim, or a carefully worded description, while the fuller picture often sits elsewhere, such as in reports, audits, NGO databases, certification criteria, or not in public view at all. This means the challenge is not just about informed consumers. It is also about who controls visibility, who defines credibility, and how markets and platforms shape what becomes knowable in the first place.

This matters especially in product search, comparison, and purchasing because shopping environments tend to foreground the things that are easiest to display and optimize: price, convenience, delivery speed, ratings, and standard product features. Social and environmental information often sits elsewhere, for example in sustainability reports, labels, NGO databases, certifications, third-party sites, or hard-to-read documentation. As a result, responsible criteria are harder to bring into real decisions. People may care about labour conditions, sourcing, emissions, or durability, but that information is often scattered, hard to compare, or hard to trust at the moment they need it.

2. Key works

Akerlof (1970) A classic foundation, Akerlof’s “lemons” paper showed how markets can malfunction when sellers know more than buyers about product quality. It still matters here because responsible consumption often involves exactly this kind of hidden quality problem: many social and environmental attributes cannot be seen directly at the point of purchase.

Delmas & Burbano (2011) This influential greenwashing paper explained why misleading environmental claims are not just accidents, but predictable outcomes when firms benefit from appearing responsible under weak information conditions. It matters because it makes clear that the problem is not only absent information, but also strategically managed information.

Grunert, Hieke & Wills (2014) This widely cited study examined sustainability labels as tools meant to help consumers use ethical and environmental information in food choices. It matters because it shows both the promise and the limit of labels: even when signals exist, they do not automatically become understandable, trusted, or actionable.

Lyon & Montgomery (2015) A major review of greenwashing, this paper brought together a fragmented discussion into a clearer account of how environmental claims can mislead. It matters because it helps explain why responsible shopping is shaped not just by information supply, but by selective disclosure, impression management, and confusion.

Gossen et al. (2022) This newer study of online fashion retail analyzed how sustainability labels are used at scale in e-commerce and found large differences in credibility and comparability. It matters because it brings the information problem into digital shopping systems, where tags and labels are plentiful but often uneven in meaning and trustworthiness.

3. Initiative’s contribution

From Query to Conscience: The Importance of Information Retrieval in Empowering Socially Responsible Consumerism (van der Sluis, Azzopardi, Meier, 2025) adds an important framing contribution by treating responsible consumption partly as an information extraction problem aimed at reducing information asymmetries. The paper highlights how selective disclosure, greenwashing, fragmented labels, and scattered evidence make it difficult to turn secondary-aspect information into something shoppers can actually use. Its contribution is not only about helping consumers search better, but also about the infrastructures and intermediaries that extract, structure, and surface trustworthy information from diverse sources in the first place.

Rare but Respected: Sustainable Intent in Online Product Search (Meier & Elsweiler, 2026) provides a concrete example of how digital shopping infrastructures mediate sustainable intent. The study examines Amazon query autocompletion and asks whether it suppresses or supports sustainability-related intent during product search. It finds that sustainable intent is relatively rare, but generally preserved or even reinforced by query autocompletion rather than systematically demoted. This matters because the information problem is not only about missing data. It is also about how commercial search systems shape what becomes visible, suggested, and normalized when people begin to search.

4. Why this changes the conversation

This shifts the conversation in a useful way. Instead of treating information asymmetry only as a general market problem, it points to responsible product search as a practical problem of extraction, structuring, surfacing, and mediation. That brings digital infrastructures into view: search systems, product databases, ranking systems, labels, filters, and intermediaries all influence whether responsible-product information becomes usable in real shopping situations. In that sense, this is not only a consumer problem, but also a market and infrastructure problem, shaped by what shopping systems make easy to find, easy to compare, and easy to act on.

Read more

1. Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488–500. https://doi.org/10.2307/1879431
2. Delmas, M. A., & Burbano, V. C. (2011). The Drivers of Greenwashing. California Management Review, 54(1), 64–87. https://doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2011.54.1.64
3. Gossen, M., Jäger, S., Hoffmann, M. L., Bießmann, F., Korenke, R., & Santarius, T. (2022). Nudging Sustainable Consumption: A Large-Scale Data Analysis of Sustainability Labels for Fashion in German Online Retail. Frontiers in Sustainability, 3, 922984. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2022.922984
4. Grunert, K. G., Hieke, S., & Wills, J. (2014). Sustainability Labels on Food Products: Consumer Motivation, Understanding, and Use. Food Policy, 44, 177–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2013.12.001
5. Lyon, T. P., & Montgomery, A. W. (2015). The Means and End of Greenwash. Organization & Environment, 28(2), 223–249. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026615575332
6. Meier, F. M., & Elsweiler, D. (2026). Rare but Respected: Sustainable Intent in Online Product Search. CHIIR ’26: Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 485–490. https://doi.org/10.1145/3786304.3787877
7. van der Sluis, F., Azzopardi, L., & Meier, F. (2025). From Query to Conscience: The Importance of Information Retrieval in Empowering Socially Responsible Consumerism. Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 3853–3864. https://doi.org/10.1145/3726302.3730347