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Access Type

WSU Access

Date of Award

January 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Young-Ro Yoon

Abstract

Corporate environmental communication has become increasingly important as stakeholders demand greater transparency and accountability from firms regarding their sustainability practices. However, this has also given rise to the phenomena of greenwashing, where firms engage in misleading or deceptive environmental claims, and greenhushing, where firms deliberately underreport or fail to disclose their positive environmental actions. This dissertation provides a comprehensive review and of the literature on greenwash and greenhush, highlighting the drivers, consequences, and theoretical underpinnings. It introduces a novel framework that characterizes these practices as forms of communication decoupling, drawing on signaling theory to analyze the strategic interactions between firms and their stakeholders.

The dissertation proceeds in several chapters. First, it provides a systematic review of the greenhush literature, and proposes an integrated framework to understand the phenomenon through the lens of stakeholder theory. Second, it develops a novel model of greenwash in the presence of social network effects. This chapter explores how the social value of green consumption affects the eco-labeling strategies of firms. Third, it develops a model of eco-labeling which explains greenhush and greenwash as the result of conflicting stakeholder demands.

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