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Studies in European Economic Law and Regulation 16
Peter Rott Editor
Certification –
Trust,
Accountability,
Liability
Studies in European Economic Law
and Regulation
Volume 16
Series editors
Kai Purnhagen
Law and Governance Group, Wageningen University
Wageningen, The Netherlands
Josephine van Zeben
Worcester College, University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
Editorial Board
Alberto Alemanno, HEC Paris, Paris, France
Mads Andenaes, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Stefania Baroncelli, University of Bozen, Bozen, Italy
Franziska Boehm, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
Anu Bradford, Columbia Law School, New York, USA
Jan Dalhuisen, King’s College London, London, UK
Michael Faure, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Jens-Uwe Franck, Mannheim University, Mannheim, Germany
Geneviève Helleringer, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Christopher Hodges, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Lars Hornuf, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Moritz Jesse, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
Marco Loos, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Petros Mavroidis, Columbia Law School, New York, USA
Hans Micklitz, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Giorgio Monti, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Florian Möslein, Philipps-University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany
Dennis Patterson, Rutgers University, Camden, USA
Wolf-Georg Ringe, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Jules Stuyck, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Bart van Vooren, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
This series is devoted to the analysis of European Economic Law. The series’ scope
covers a broad range of topics within economics law including, but not limited to,
the relationship between EU law and WTO law; free movement under EU law and
its impact on fundamental rights; antitrust law; trade law; unfair competition law;
financial market law; consumer law; food law; and health law. These subjects are
approached both from doctrinal and interdisciplinary perspectives.
The series accepts monographs focusing on a specific topic, as well as edited
collections of articles covering a specific theme or collections of articles. All
contributions are subject to rigorous double-blind peer-review.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11710

Peter Rott
Editor
Certification – Trust,
Accountability, Liability
Editor
Peter Rott
University of Kassel
Kassel, Germany
ISSN 2214-2037 ISSN 2214-2045 (electronic)

Studies in European Economic Law and Regulation
ISBN 978-3-030-02498-7 ISBN 978-3-030-02499-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02499-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932706
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
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Contents
Introduction �� 1

Peter Rott
Part I Foundations
Certification as Solution to the Asymmetric Information Problem? �� 11
Georg von Wangenheim
Challenges for Responsible Certification in Institutional Context:
The Case of Competition Law Enforcement in Markets
with Certification �� 23
Victoria I. Daskalova and Michiel A. Heldeweg
The Use of Conformity Assessment of Construction Products by the
European Union and National Governments: Legitimacy, Effectiveness
and the Functioning of the Union Market �� 73
Richard Neerhof
Part II Success and Shortcomings of Certification Systems

Privacy Through Certification?: The New Certification Scheme of the
General Data Protection Regulation �� 109
Gerrit Hornung and Stefan Bauer
Can Certification Enhance the Feasibility of Insurance? �� 133
Miranda P. M. Meuwissen
Control in the Label: Self-Declared, Certified, Accredited? �� 143
Hanna Schebesta
Certification of the Sustainability of Biofuels in Global Supply Chains �� 163
Carola Glinski
v
vi Contents
Part III Liability for Negligent Certification

Certification of Medical Devices: Lessons from the PIP Scandal �� 189
Peter Rott
Public Function Liability of Classification Societies �� 213
Vibe Ulfbeck and Anders Møllmann
Liability of Rating Agencies Under German and European Law �� 231
Axel Halfmeier
Introduction
Peter Rott
1 The Theme of the Book
Certification means the confirmation of compliance with a pre-defined standard

relating to a business, a product, a service or a management system. That standard
can be a public law standard, a private standard or a hybrid.1
Certification has become a hot topic, in particular at the European level. It is a
popular instrument of private governance of public goods, promising greater effec-
tiveness than control by public authorities while at the same time taking the burden
away from the State and its budget. Being a private instrument, it had long been
attributed to the private sphere; which has changed drastically through recent deci-
sions of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that take into consider-
ation the immense factual power of at least some private actors with regard to the
facilitation of trade or to creating obstacles to trade. In the case of Fra.bo,2 the
German privately organised Deutsche Vereinigung des Gas- und Wasserfaches eV
(DVGW) denied the certification of copper fittings for piping for water or gas, pro-
duced by the Italian producer Fra.bo. The Court held that Article 28 TFEU on the
free movement of goods must be interpreted as meaning that it applies to standardi-
sation and certification activities of a private-law body, where the national legisla-
tion considers the products certified by that body to be compliant with national law
and that has the effect of restricting the marketing of products which are not certified
1
For detailed account, see chapter 3 by VI Daskalova and MA Heldeweg. See also Schepel (2005),
p. 3 ff.
2
CJEU, 12/7/2012, Case C-171/11, Fra.bo SpA v Deutsche Vereinigung des Gas- und Wasserfaches
eV (DVGW) — Technisch-Wissenschaftlicher Verein, ECLI:EU:C:2012:453.
P. Rott (*)
Institute of Economic Law, Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Kassel,
Kassel, Germany
e-mail: rott@uni-kassel.de
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

P. Rott (ed.), Certification – Trust, Accountability, Liability, Studies in European
Economic Law and Regulation 16,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02499-4_1
2 P. Rott
by that body. The decision in the case of James Elliott3 complemented this line of
thinking. In this case, the CJEU found that it has jurisdiction to provide a prelimi-
nary ruling concerning the interpretation of a harmonised standard that was devel-
oped by a private body under the so-called ‘New Approach’ of EU product safety
law, thus treated that private standard as part of EU law. The two decisions have
triggered intense discussion relating to the constitutionalisation of standardisation
and certification by private actors, in particular in the context of the ‘New Approach’.4
In a parallel development, the relevance of certification and similar phenomena,
such as credit ratings, for the protection of the economic interests or the health and
safety of third parties has come to the fore. The breast implants scandal around the
French producer Poly Implants Prothèse (PIP) forms a prime example. PIP had
filled the breast implants with industrial silicone rather than medical silicone. Within
the system of EU medical devices law, TÜV Rheinland acted as notified body to
monitor the activities of PIP. TÜV Rheinland had certified compliance of the prod-
uct design of the PIP breast implants and of PIP’s quality management system with
the underlying standard. Since TÜV Rheinland had not noticed the fraudulent
change of production by PIP (and since PIP itself went bankrupt following the dis-
covery of the fraud), victims initiated litigation against TÜV Rheinland in German
and French courts. Out of the many cases, the case of Elisabeth Schmitt was referred
to the CJEU.5 Rating agencies, in turn, attracted the attention of policy-makers and
of investors likewise in the context of the financial crises, and in particular of the
collapse of Lehman Brothers whose financial products had been rated “AAA” by
Standard & Poor’s. Litigation has already been initiated in different countries
including Australia and Germany.6
The above-mentioned areas of medical devices, or product safety generally, and
of credit rating are only two examples for areas in which certification plays an
important role. Other areas are the certification of food standards, of social and/or
environmentally sound production or sourcing or of compliance with standards of
consumer law or data protection law.
The cases of PIP and Lehman Brothers trigger several questions. Who benefits
from certification? Standardisation benefits primarily the relevant industry whose
transactions costs are reduced through standardisation and through certification of
compliance with certain standards.7 At the same time, certification systems may
serve further purposes, such as the protection of users or other third parties, and the
certificates that are issued may be addressed to a diversity of actors. Thus, the main
addressee of certificates can be the customer of the producer or trader who or whose
3
CJEU. 27/10/2016, Case C-613/14 James Elliott Construction Limited v Irish Asphalt Limited,
ECLI:EU:C:2016:821.
4
See, for example, Schepel (2013), p. 530; van Leeuwen (2013), p. 406; Purnhagen (2017), p. 586;
Volpato (2017), p. 597; Colombo and Eliantonio (2017), p. 332.
5
CJEU, 16/2/2017, Case C-219/15 Elisabeth Schmitt v TÜV Rheinland LGA Products GmbH,
ECLI:EU:C:2017:128. See chapter 9 by P Rott and the references therein.
6
See chapter 11 by A Halfmeier and the references therein.
7
See, for example, DIN (2000) and Blind et al. (2011).
Introduction 3
products, services, or management are certified, as in the case of credit rating or of

the certification of social and/or environmentally sound production. Certificates
may, however, be also addressed to public bodies where certification is part of a
public law control system, for example of cars, aircrafts or medical devices. Or, they
may serve the purpose to assist other third parties such as insurers that may base
their risk calculation on certificates that confirm compliance with certain
standards.
Another set of questions concern the regulatory design. Which design fits a cer-
tification system best? Which incentive system, including sanctions, should be in
place to ensure compliance of certification bodies? This may depend on a variety of
factors, including the way in which the certification body is involved (solicited by
the actor that is to be certified or commissioned by an independent party) or the
geographical scope of the certification system (national, EU-wide or global). Within
that context, (private law) liability may play an important role not only in providing
compensation to victims but also as a regulatory instrument to ensure compliance.
The book at hand unfolds the merits and perils of certification, employing the
perspectives of different disciplines and using examples from different areas of life
and law. There is an increasing amount of literature available on individual certifica-
tion systems as well as on the relevance of standardisation and certification for
(cross-border) trade, not least triggered by the above-mentioned recent case law of
the CJEU. This book takes research from various areas up and presents certification
as a cross-cutting issue. It invites lawyers and regulators from different branches, in
which certification plays a role, to learn from the experience of other branches,
rather than re-inventing the wheel time and again for each specific area. Indeed, it is
one aim of the book to discover commonalities between certification systems but
also to find differences that call for differential treatment.
2 The Structure of the Book
The book is structured in three parts. Part 1, consisting of three chapters by Georg
von Wangenheim, Michiel Heldeweg and Victoria Daskalova, and Richard Neerhof,
focuses on the fundamentals of certification: its economic background, the manifold
shapes and forms certification can take, and its relevance for competition and free
trade.
The chapters of Part 2 deal with the conditions for the success of certification in
creating trust as well as incentives for compliance with private standards, and in
monitoring compliance with standards, using examples from various sectors. Gerrit
Hornung and Stefan Bauer introduce and discuss the new data protection seal as
envisaged by the General Data Protection Regulation. Miranda Meuwissen presents
empirical studies that show how certification gains relevance for insurance by facili-
tating risk classification and management. In a more skeptical approach, Hanna
Schebesta looks at problematic (voluntary) certification practices in the food sector
and presents the new certification marks of the EU Trademark Regulation of 2015
4 P. Rott
as a potential solution. Carola Glinski describes the certification of biofuels under

EU renewable energies law and its shortcomings that are, among others, caused by
long supply chains that often begin in the developing countries of the Global South.
Parts 3 takes the perspective of third party liability for negligent or fraudulent
certification as a regulatory instrument that may be necessary to complement public
law control of certification bodies but also discusses impediments to third party
liability stemming from the rules on jurisdiction, private international law or con-
tract and tort law doctrine that do not sufficiently accommodate harm caused to
more or less remote third parties. This perspective is elaborated with regard to spe-
cific certification systems and their particularities. Peter Rott discusses the sector of
medical devices and the PIP scandal, Vibe Ulfbeck and Anders Møllmann analyse,
in a comparative manner, the liability of classification societies that certify the
safety of vessels, and Axel Halfmeier explores the liability of rating agencies for
losses of investors that trust in their ratings.
3 The Individual Chapters
3.1 Part 1: Foundations
In his chapter on ‘Certification as solution to the asymmetric information prob-

lem?’, Georg von Wangenheim introduces certification as a communication instru-
ment that is meant to help the customer to make an informed choice. Economic
theory sees certification as a solution to the informational problems of experience
and credence goods. The problem is that certification in itself is an experience or
credence good; which may entice opportunistic behaviour of certifiers. Von
Wangenheim discusses possible solutions to that problem but also identifies open
questions to the design of a good legal framework for the certification market, from
an economic point of view.
Michiel Heldeweg and Victoria Daskalova look at certification from a legal gov-
ernance perspective within particular institutional contexts. In their chapter on
‘Legal Design of a Meta-Regulatory Regime for Responsible Certification’, they
distinguish the contexts of competitive/unregulated markets, public hierarchies and
civil society and discuss the legal requirements that follow from these contexts as
regards a responsible use of certification. The first part of this chapter discusses the
main functionality and relevance of certification as a regulatory instrument—
whether in a market setting or in the context of public hierarchy. In its second dis-
tinct part, the chapter focuses on competitive markets and on the risks for market
access that may stem from certification systems, and how competition law doctrine
can be used to set limits to such negative externalities. This is discussed in the con-
text of an unregulated market as well as in the context of public hierarchy where
certification acts as a substitute of granting public permission or is conditional to the
Introduction 5
grant of such a permission, or where certification is part of public enforcement or a

substitute thereof.
Richard Neerhof, in his chapter on ‘The Use of Conformity Assessment of
Construction Products by the European Union and the Dutch Government: Issues of
Legitimacy, Effectiveness and Functioning of the Union Market’, uses the example
of the certification of construction products under two different certification regimes,
stemming from EU law and from Dutch national law, to discuss the broader issues
of legitimacy and effectiveness of certification within product safety law. The chap-
ter first explains the basic concept of how certification (and standardisation) is inte-
grated into the so-called ‘New Approach’ to product safety law and then discusses
in great detail the risks that the system poses with regard to the inclusion of all rel-
evant interests, to equal market access, and finally the quality of regulation and
control, an issue that is taken up in other contributions in relation to specific
markets.
3.2 Part 2: Success and Shortcomings of Certification Systems
Part 2 starts with Gerrit Hornung’s and Stefan Bauer’s chapter on ‘The new
European Data Protection Seal – data protection through market’ that discusses the
increasing prominence of certification in the sector of data protection. Under the
new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), audit and certification mecha-
nisms are means of co-regulation and aimed at creating market incentives. This
optional enforcement layer is meant to enhance the standard of privacy protection.
At the same time, the authors show that the new rules offer the opportunity to create
transparency through a system of harmonised standards with regard to privacy seals
and marks; instruments that have been used in the market before but with limited
informative value, due to the lack of common standards.
That certification is indeed suitable to build trust is shown by Miranda Meuwissen
in her chapter ‘Can certification enhance the feasibility of insurance?’. The feasibil-
ity of insurance heavily depends on the behaviour of the insured. Certification can
be a tool to facilitate risk classification and monitoring. The author presents findings
from empirical studies on liability insurance in the animal feed industry, epidemic
disease insurance for farmers, and liability insurance in the horse business, that
illustrate that certification schemes have the potential to enhance feasibility of insur-
ance schemes, among others as a tool to cope with adverse selection.
In contrast, Hanna Schebesta rather deals with ‘bad’ certification practices, using
the food sector as an example. In her contribution ‘Control in the label - self-
declared, certified, accredited? - On-pack consumer communication about compli-
ance control in voluntary food schemes from a legal perspective’, she identifies
problematic certification practices in the domain and explores the potential of the
current regulatory framework of unfair commercial practices law to effectively
combat these practices. Moreover, she discusses a new legal development that might
provide for more stringent solutions than food information law in the narrow sense:
6 P. Rott
EU certification marks that were introduced with the new EU Trademark Regulation
of 2015 and that are meant to inform end-consumers of product qualities related to
the largely opaque steps of the process leading to the product to which they are
affixed.
The last chapter of Part 2, by Carola Glinski on ‘Certification of the sustainabil-
ity of biofuels in global supply chains’, deals with an area where public law control
of the production chain is not possible, due to public international law limitations,
but where simple exclusion of foreign actors or products is not feasible either, due
to the requirements of international trade law. The promotion of biofuels in the EU
aims at the substitution of fossil fuels and the reduction of carbon emissions. In
order to make sure that the production of biomass does not result in negative impacts
on greenhouse gas stocks or on biodiversity, the promotion of biofuels is accompa-
nied by sustainability requirements. As the majority of biomass for biofuels is pro-
duced in the ‘Global South’ with often low regulatory and enforcement capacities,
compliance with the sustainability requirements is safeguarded through a highly
complex certification set-up based on private certification systems and private certi-
fication bodies which thereby replace, to a certain extent, the regulatory and admin-
istrative role of the State. The author analyses that system of control and its potential
weaknesses to ensure sustainable production of biofuels.
3.3 Part 3: Liability for Negligent Certification
Peter Rott picks up the topic of the effectiveness of private certification in product
safety law and the role of tort law liability for the compensation of victims of negli-
gent certification and as a regulatory instrument to incentivise certification bodies to
live up to their duties. In his contribution ‘Certification of medical devices: Lessons
from the PIP scandal’, he describes the development of certification and accredita-
tion in medical devices law. Having started with a fairly general framework, proven
failures in the system, and in particular the breast implant scandal around the French
producer Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) and the German certification organisation
TÜV Rheinland, medical devices law has seen ever more intense regulation of the
control chain, culminating in the new Medical Devices Regulation of 2017. The
narrative of the legislative history and the reasons for the various legislative changes
illustrate the risks that come with the privatisation of health and safety regulation
and control and trigger the question as to whether private law liability of certifica-
tion organisations towards victims of unsafe medical devices is a necessary ingredi-
ent to make the system work.
Liability for insufficient control by certification organisations is also at the heart
of the contribution by Vibe Ulfbeck and Anders Møllmann on ‘Public function lia-
bility of classification societies’, dealing with the certification of vessels. Among
others, flag states commonly delegate it to classification societies to perform sur-
veys and inspections pursuant to various international conventions and to issue cer-
tificates under these conventions on behalf of the flag state (statutory certification).
Introduction 7
If a ship that has been so certified is involved in an incident causing damage to a

third party, the question arises whether that third party can hold the classification
society liable in damages. The authors show how the public function of such certi-
fication adds an extra layer of complications if the activity of the classification soci-
ety is attributed to the flag state itself, potentially triggering procedural and/or
substantive immunity in different legal systems, and how the limited liability for
statutory certification has recently even spilled over to commercial certification of
classification societies.
Rating of financial products, finally, is another system that is meant to build trust
between issuers of financial products and investors but that has gained a dubious
reputation through the 2008 financial crisis, where rating agencies were identified
as actors that contributed to the crisis. Axel Halfmeier describes in his chapter on
‘Liability of Rating Agencies under German and European Law’, how in various
legal proceedings—some of which are still pending until today—the question of the
liability of rating agencies vis-à-vis investors was raised. The author analyses such
claims with regard to jurisdiction and applicable law, and discusses substantive
German law as well as first case law on this question. In addition, the recent
European legislation on rating agencies’ liability and its relation to Member States’
private laws is covered.
4 A Word of Thanks
‘Certification Bodies – Trust, Accountability, Liability’ was the title of a bilateral

international workshop to support the initiation of international collaboration
between the Universities of Kassel and Wageningen. It was organised by Peter Rott
and Martina Deckert at the University of Kassel, with Kai Purnhagen from the
University of Wageningen as co-operation partner. The workshop was funded by the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), for which the editor wishes to express
his gratitude.
References
Blind, K., Jungmittag, A., & Mangelsdorf, A. (2011). Der gesamtwirtschaftliche Nutzen der
Normung. DIN.
Colombo, C., & Eliantonio, M. (2017). Harmonized technical standards as part of EU law:
Juridification with a number of unresolved legitimacy concerns? Case C-613/14 James
Elliot Construction Limited v. Irish Asphalt Limited, EU:C:2016:821. Maastricht Journal of
European and Comparative Law, 24, 332.
DIN. (2000). Gesamtwirtschaftlicher Nutzen der Normung - Unternehmerischer Nutzen. DIN.
Purnhagen, K. (2017). Voluntary “New Approach” technical standards are subject to judicial scru-
tiny by the CJEU! – The remarkable CJEU judgment “Elliott” on private standards. European
Journal of Risk Regulation, 8, 586.
8 P. Rott
Schepel, H. (2005). The constitution of private governance – Product standards in the regulation
of integrating markets. Oxford, England: Hart.
Schepel, H. (2013). The new approach to the new approach: The juridification of harmonized stan-
dards in EU law. Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, 20, 530.
van Leeuwen, B. (2013). From status to impact, and the role of national legislation: The applica-
tion of article 34 TFEU to a private certification organisation in Fra.bo. European Journal of
Risk Regulation, 4, 406.
Volpato, A. (2017). The harmonized standards before the ECJ: James Elliott Construction.
Common Market Law Review, 57, 597.
Part I
Foundations
Certification as Solution to the Asymmetric
Information Problem?
Georg von Wangenheim
1 Introduction
Certification of products, services and even certification agencies aims at various

objectives. If certification is a prerequisite for bringing a product or service to the
market, it is not much different from quality regulation organized as a general pro-
hibition of the product with individual permission as the exception. If it is a private
agency that provides certification under these circumstances, certification is tanta-
mount to out-sourcing of genuine government activity. This form of certification is
not topic of this contribution. Certification may also aim at solving or alleviating a
problem of asymmetric information. A certificate is then similar to a signal of a sup-
plier on the quality of his products. Obviously, producers may also refrain from
sending the signal, that is, they may supply their product without certificate. The
economic literature has discussed certification in this voluntary sense in several
perspectives. The objective of this chapter is to review this literature and thereby to
lay the grounds for the ensuing legal analysis in this book.
I will first remind the reader of the distinction between search goods on the one
hand and experience and credence goods on the other hand (Sect. 2). This will allow
me to recapitulate the basic model of certification due to Viscusi1 in Sect. 3. I will
proceed with a number of variations of this model. In Sect. 4, I will report how some
of the literature allows for opportunism of certification agencies, either by withhold-
ing information or by exerting less than socially optimal effort on collecting infor-
mation about the goods to be certified. Hardly surprising, this also includes collusion
1
Viscusi (1978), p. 277.
G. von Wangenheim (*)

Institute of Economic Law, Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Kassel,
Kassel, Germany
e-mail: g.wangenheim@uni-kassel.de

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02499-4_2
12 G. von Wangenheim
between producers and certifiers. Section 5 studies certification of reaching

minimum standards including decisions on how such standards become determined.
I then (Sect. 6) collect a number of variations to the basic Viscusi model which sug-
gest themselves as fields of further investigation but which so far have not or hardly
been discussed in the literature. Section 7 concludes. Throughout the chapter, I will
use the term ‘producers’ to describe the supply side of a market in which certifica-
tion occurs and the term ‘consumers’ for the demand side.
2 arkets for Search Goods, Experience Goods

M
and Credence Goods
Since the seminal papers of Nelson2 and Darby and Karni,3 it is common to distin-
guish the three types of goods mentioned in the title of this section. Search goods
are what economists have in mind when they present the simple model of a competi-
tive market or even a monopoly market. All parties to a contract can easily observe
all properties of search goods which the contract covers before it is concluded.
Hence, there are no information asymmetries. Any care the seller of such a good
takes increases the quality of the good as the buyer observes it. Consequently, addi-
tional care increases the buyer’s valuation of the good and thus his willingness to
pay too. The seller of the product has thus incentives to increase care and thus the
quality of the product as long as the additional costs of care and quality are lower
than the additional valuation of the buyer for the good measured in his willingness
to pay. There is thus no need for any further incentives for the seller to take care and
provide high quality. No regulation is needed, not even liability is required as an
incentive to achieve economic efficiency.
Rarely the argument convinces for all properties of a specific good. It is therefore
more precise to speak of search properties of a good—and experience properties
and credence properties accordingly. However, most of the arguments are more eas-
ily presented if one assumes that all goods can easily be allocated to one of the three
groups without differentiation with respect to their specific properties. We therefore
follow this simplification, which is standard in the literature.
If the buyer cannot observe the qualities of a good before the contract, it is called
an experience good or a credence good, depending on whether the buyer can observe
properties after having entered into the contract or not even then. In both cases, the
argument in favour of economic efficiency of the market is flawed: while additional
care does still increase quality (and costs of production), the buyer’s valuation of the
product and his willingness to pay are not affected any more. Therefore, taking care
and increasing quality cease to be worthwhile to the seller. As Akerlof has shown,
2
Nelson (1970), p. 311.
3
Darby and Karni (1973), p. 67; an often-cited formalization and extension of the argument is
Emons (1997), p. 107.
Certification as Solution to the Asymmetric Information Problem? 13
also in 1970,4 any variance of quality in the market tends to break down and so
possibly does the entire market due to the problem of adverse selection. Of course,
there are ways to overcome these problems, ranging from guarantees given by the
seller in order to signal his high quality, reputation, regulation and, not the least, the
topic of this chapter: certification as a means to reduce asymmetries of information.
All these remedies may substitute each other to some degree, but certification may
be the most efficient remedy under certain circumstances. It is therefore helpful to
better understand how certification works in detail.
3 The Basic Viscusi Model
Nearly 40 years ago, Kip Viscusi introduced a first model of purely market-based
certification as a means to signal high quality of a producer.5 The argument is based
on standard signalling theory: High-quality producers of goods approach a (private)
certification agency.6 This certifier investigates the quality of the product at some
costs, which he charges to the producer demanding certification.7 His investigation
technology is rather simple: if he incurs the costs (of a given amount), he receives
perfect and complete information on the quality of the product. He then correctly
certifies this quality in a way that consumers of the good can fully understand. As a
consequence, consumers can and do decide according to their preferences which of
the certified products they buy and at which price. Obviously, it is not worthwhile
for low quality producers to purchase certification because such certification would
not provide any information to consumers that is valuable to the producer. In equi-
librium, only and all producers whose products are of a sufficiently high quality will
purchase certification, where ‘sufficiently high’ means that the quality induces con-
sumers to be willing to pay more than their average valuation of non-certified prod-
ucts plus the certification costs. From the consumers’ perspective, such certification
elucidates the individual quality of all high quality products and the average quality
of uncertified low-quality products.
4
Akerlof (1970), p. 488.
5
Viscusi (1978).
6
Stahl and Strausz (2017), p. 1842, discuss the assumption that it is the producers who pay the
certifier and not the consumer—an assumption prevailing in nearly all publications on certifica-
tion. They show that in general, certification purchased by producers is (1) more informative due
to the information contained in the decision to certify, which is partly observable and (2) superior
from a welfare point of view. The result is reinforced by the argument that certification purchased
by consumers may be obstructed by low-quality producers. The only exception to this result is
subsidized certification: Stahl and Strausz show their central results hinge on the price for certifica-
tion being at or above marginal costs of certification.
7
Faulhaber and Yao (1989), p. 65, consider a different type of information producing agents:
‘reviewers’ who are paid by consumers rather than by producers, which turns the model from a
signaling to a screening approach. As ‘reviewing’ is empirically much less relevant than certifica-
tion, this paper concentrates on the latter.
Obviously, Viscusi’s model was a first step towards understanding certification,

but most problems require more complex approaches to be appropriately dealt with.
In particular, certifiers may be able to decide on providing correct information on
the producers’ quality or not, certification may refer to only a threshold being met,
consumers’ preferences may be heterogeneous, multiple certifiers may certify dif-
ferent aspects of goods, and both producers and consumers may exert costly effort
to deliberately disguise or discover the true quality of products. The following sec-
tions will tackle these problems, many of which the literature has already discussed
while others still await careful scrutiny.
4 Opportunistic Certifying Agencies
The simple-most way to allow for opportunistic certifying agencies is to assume

that the agency not simply finds and discloses the true quality of the producer’s
good, but chooses between three alternative actions after the producer has solicited
its services. It may either exert honest effort and thus produce true information on
the quality of the good or simply guess the quality without exerting effort or certify
the highest-possible quality, again without exerting any effort.8 Depending on how
costly it is to verify the certifier’s quality assertion, certification itself becomes an
experience good or even a credence good. All problems of asymmetric information,
which were at the very basis of any need for certification, re-occur.
Re-occurring problems suggest re-occurring and standard solutions: guarantees
or other forms of liability, reputation, regulation and certification. Certification of
certifying agencies obviously runs the risk of an infinite regress. To avoid it, one has
to argue that there is a tier of certification on which the asymmetric-information
problem is solved. Thus, only the other three standard approaches may overcome
asymmetric information as a source of fraudulent or negligent certification.
Two reasons exclude that guarantees and other forms of liability work for certi-
fiers. First, it is hard to imagine that guarantees or liability of certifiers can provide
reliable information to consumers when guarantees and liability of producers can-
not. Second, unless honest certifiers never err on the quality they certify, a guarantee
or liability, from which all consumers would have to benefit, would entail tremen-
dous expected costs for the certifier and therefore make certification too expensive
a signal.9 One should be aware that this argument holds true for negligence liability
as much as it does for strict liability unless one adopts the hardly realistic assump-
tion of perfect information on the standard of care required for certifiers.
Among others, Roland Strausz10 has dealt with reputation of certifiers. An impor-
tant property of reputation in general is that it relies on the comparison of one-time
8
Biglaiser (1993), p. 212, was the first to mention these possibilities.
9
Biglaiser (1993) circumvents this problem by assuming that certification only refers to a single
unit of the good and each and every unit is certified individually.
10
Strausz (2005), p. 45.
gains and long run losses from reneging on one’s quality promise. In a dynamic
setting, reputation therefore exhibits substantial economies of scale and economies
of scope: the larger a firm and the more products benefit from the same reputation,
the more there is to lose from defecting on reputation and thus the more credible a
promise to provide high quality becomes. As certifiers specialise in reputation for
credibility, their business is most susceptible to the consequences of economies of
scale and scope: monopolization of the market, or at least oligopolisation. As
Strausz shows, this may raise prices in the certification market even beyond the
static monopoly price.
However, the economic literature is far from completely understanding reputa-
tion in certification markets as the solution to the asymmetric-information problem.
The existing models11 suffer from multiple equilibria, only some of which stabilise
reputation and honest certification. Most publications in the field concentrate on
these desirable equilibria but fail to give good reasons for this abstraction, nor do
they explain how reputation for honest certification grows in the first place.12 Again,
the aforementioned economies of scale and scope exacerbate the problem—reputa-
tion only becomes stable when it promises future gains for many and frequent cases.
To propose government regulation of certification agencies as an alternative
solution to asymmetric information raises questions of the same kind as in other
markets. If government wanted to regulate the output of certifiers, it would be hard
to imagine why the regulator does not use the information required for such regula-
tion of the certifiers to regulate the certified industry directly. Regulation by liability
would suffer from the same problems as discussed before for guarantees. Given the
limited information available to evaluate the care that certification agencies take,
both a negligence and a strict liability regime would expose the certification agen-
cies to a risk of high-stake liabilities that would very quickly destroy any supply on
the market for certification.
Only input regulation, i.e. qualification requirements for the certifiers and
requirements of observable signals of high effort that agencies exert to prepare their
certification decision, can be administered without essentially suppressing any sup-
ply of certification services. Obliging certifiers to employ qualified personnel or
proving their competence in some way or other reduces their opportunity costs of
handing down high-quality certification decisions.13 Obviously, such input regulation
11
Apart from Strausz (2005) see, e.g. Peyrache and Quesada (2011), p. 1099.
12
Peyrache and Quesada (2011) construct a model, in which the certifiers do not switch immedi-
ately from honesty to complete corruption when their time preference becomes too strong, but
gradually increase the range of true qualities for which they accept bribes for exaggerating the
quality in their report, when the relative value they attach to future profits declines.
13
See Shapiro (1986), p. 843, for a first model studying the effects of input regulation in markets
with reputation for output quality. Shapiro considers input regulation in two forms: licensing, i.e.
abolition of supply by producers without a minimum education, and certification, i.e. truthful
information of consumers about whether a producer has passed the minimum education or not.
Note that Shapiro uses the term ‘certification’ for information on input qualification while in this
paper I use it for information on output quality, in line with most of the economic certification
literature.
is far from guaranteeing high quality certification, not the least because it also
reduces competition between certifiers.14
In addition to the simple model of shirking and collusion with only two or three
alternative actions of the certification agency discussed so far in this section, one
could explicitly model the probability of the certifier to determine the quality cor-
rectly as a function of his effort to avoid such errors. On first sight, this endogeneity
of error probabilities does not change much of the argument presented so far.
Producers with high quality will still be the ones who request certification and the
problems of collusion between producer and certifier remain vivid. However, strate-
gies to overcome incentive problems of certification agencies cannot be as simple as
before. As error probabilities cannot be zero with finite effort, optimal strategies of
both producers and consumers must be forgiving and somewhat tolerant with
respect to misreported quality.15 In such a world, market incentives for producers to
produce high quality and for certifiers to exert effort and not to collude with produc-
ers necessarily are incomplete. Although to the best of my knowledge no such
model of certification exists in the literature, I conjecture that no Nash equilibrium
with a socially optimal level of the certifier’s effort or absence of collusion exists,
because that would require observation of effort or full internalization of the conse-
quences of errors. Certification therefore will not be a perfect solution to the quality
problem. Any lawyer-economist might again be tempted to rely on liability to close
the gap between market equilibrium and the social optimum. However, the same
obstacles as discussed before will prevent this approach from being successful.
Strict liability would entail complete insurance of consumers by certifiers for which
hardly any consumer would be willing to pay. Perhaps to a lesser degree but still so,
the same would be true for negligence liability due to unobservability of the certi-
fier’s effort and a thus necessarily uncertain standard of care.
5 Certification of Minimum Quality
Leaving aside the aforementioned problems of incomplete information of the certi-

fier, several authors study the causes and effects of minimum quality certification.
In these models certificates only refer to whether a good’s quality meets (or sur-
passes) a certain minimum standard.
Buehler and Schuett follow Viscusi’s original assumption that certificates are
truthful information on quality. Minimum standard certification then becomes very
similar to public quality regulation. The crucial difference is, of course, that with
certification producers may still decide to produce a quality below the minimum
standard and that it is the market and not the regulator who decides on whether there
14
Kleiner (2000), p. 189, stresses this problem for occupational licensing in general.
15
See Green and Porter (1984), p. 87, for an early model of enforcement of cooperation with uncer-
tainty in a completely different field (cooperation in a cartel). Ganuza et al. (2016), p. 213, apply
the model to quality reputation but not to certification.
is demand for low quality products or not. Buehler and Schuett16 study the effects of
such certification in a duopoly market with some but not all consumers uninformed
about quality. They show that minimum quality certification is superior to minimum
quality regulation when the number of uninformed consumers is large because the
latter tends to deter firms from entering into the market. Van der Schaar and Zhang17
show that the existing results do not depend on the crude simplifications of the pre-
vious literature but extend to a situation where information of some consumers is
not exogenously given, but evolves from reputation over time by Bayesian updating
based on stochastically distorted quality observations.
Lizzeri18 endogenises the disclosure strategy of the intermediary in his model. In
particular, he assumes that the certifier perfectly observes the quality of a good, but
truthfully discloses information on this quality only according to a previously
announced rule, which may, for example, be disclosure of the exact quality or only
information on whether a certain threshold has been passed. One should note that
this assumption also excludes collusion between the producer and the certifier. It
turns out that certifiers with market power will restrict the information they
disclose.
In the extreme case of a monopolist certifier and quality being a merely stochas-
tic outcome of production costs equal across all producers, information will be
restricted to whether quality meets or passes one certain threshold, where this
threshold guarantees that socially valuable qualities, i.e. those which consumers
value higher than the costs of production, are certified while the others are not. The
central argument for this being an equilibrium is that it allows the certifier to maxi-
mise his profits. In less extreme cases, disclosed information will be more detailed
for high qualities, but there will be no differentiation between the low quality
products.
The insights of Lizzeri indicate that certifiers’ policies to only inform about
whether quality meets a threshold is not only a tribute to restrictions of consumers’
limited abilities to process detailed information but also originates from certifiers’
profit maximisation.19 Farhi et al.20 and Lerner and Tirole21 have extended the argu-
ment to incorporate multiple certifiers with only one threshold for each certifier but
different thresholds across them. None of them is interested in revealing the identi-
ties of producers who applied for their certificate but failed to meet the standard.
Such tiered certification systems also add more costs, and delay, to the provision of
information, as producers tend to start high and apply with lower tier certifiers only
after having failed to get high-level certification.
16
Buehler and Schuett (2014), p. 493.
17
van der Schaar and Zhang (2015), p. 509.
18
Lizzeri (1999), p. 214.
19
For an overview of further results supporting this claim, see Pollrich and Wagner (2016), pp. 345
and 346.
20
Farhi et al. (2013), p. 610.
21
Lerner and Tirole (2006), p. 109.
The consequences of minimum quality certification on producers’ incentives to

exert costly effort for improving quality are quite obvious. If information of certifi-
ers is perfect, producers have no incentive to increase quality unless they are able to
surpass the next threshold. If there is only one threshold, only two qualities will
remain in the market. If certification is stochastic but higher quality increases the
probability to be certified, producers of course also have incentives to improve qual-
ity if they are in the vicinity of a threshold. As certification agencies capture some
of the additional profits a producer gets from selling certified high quality, voluntary
certification cannot induce as strong incentives to produce high quality as perfect
information of consumers would.22
6 Open Questions
Despite many steps forward in economic research on certification during the last
two decades, understanding of the full complexity of certification in real world mar-
kets is still incomplete. Three major open questions are the effects (1) of heteroge-
neous consumer preferences, (2) of bounded rationality, and (3) of producers’
choice between quality improvement and active concealment of low quality.
Heterogeneity of consumers’ preferences is likely to be covered with minor
changes of the existing models when only one quality dimension exists and con-
sumers vary in their willingness to pay for such quality. However, adding more
dimensions adds more strategic choices for certifiers as well as for producers.
Imagine, for example, a market for a good produced from resources harvested in
less developed countries and consumed in industrialized countries. Consumers may,
and casual experience shows that they do, care for ecological aspects of resource
growing in LDC and of production in the industrialized country, for social circum-
stances of resource growing and production (e.g. child labour), and for the effects of
the final product on consumers’ health. And consumers will care for these aspects to
different degrees. Das23 provides a first attempt to analyse certification in a market
in which consumers care for more than one quality dimension. Although he models
certification only for one dimension, the addition of a second preference dimension
seems to alter results dramatically and provide additional insights: non-profit certi-
fication becomes superior to for-profit certification if the second dimension of pref-
erences has weak effects on consumers’ choices.24
Such heterogeneity is likely to bring about separate certification agencies, each
being responsible for one or very few quality dimensions. Even within one general
22
Albano and Lizzeri (2001), p. 267; Hvide (2009), Article 5.
23
Das (2016), p. 251.
24
The intuition for this surprising result is that non-certification and thus production of low quality
may be a means to separate markets and thus collect monopoly rents on both markets. If differen-
tiation by the second quality dimension is large enough, certification is not needed to differentiate
products.
quality aspect with asymmetric information, several certifiers may emerge despite
the aforementioned concentration tendencies. Closely competing certification agen-
cies will of course compete on prices they charge to producers but also on the appro-
priateness of their standards of certification for consumers’ preferences. Given
bounded rationality of consumers, even certificates for completely useless or other-
wise irrelevant properties, like e.g. ‘produced without labour of white elephants’,
may emerge and remain in the market for some time. Economic analysis of such
distracting certificates is as much open to further research as the selection of rele-
vant quality dimensions by certifiers.
Surprisingly, nearly all existent economic models of certification completely rely
on asymmetric information in a world where consumers are perfectly rational.25 It is
well known that bounded rationality is not as easily described in a general model as
perfect rationality. Nevertheless, as certification has developed as one major way to
reduce information asymmetries it seems to be straight-forward to also include it in
models with boundedly rational consumers as an instrument to reduce complexity
of information and thus improve decisions of these boundedly rational consumers.
Pu and Zhang26 are the only authors so far, who explicitly include bounded rational-
ity in a model of voluntary certification. However, they reduce bounded rationality
to the inability of consumers to recognise fraudulent certification in a model of one
quality dimension and a given proportion of consumers who are rational and thus
identify the quality of the good directly. Problems of bounded rationality related to
the multiplicity of quality dimensions remain uncovered in the theory-based litera-
ture. Our economic understanding of these problems is still scant.
Finally, a third open field in microeconomic theory in general and the economic
discussion of voluntary certification in particular deserves mention here: the aggra-
vation of information asymmetries by producers, and certifiers, of goods. Suppliers
in any market may be tempted to spend resources on misleading consumers of their
products, be they goods or information, in their perception of quality. The weakest
form, still close to the standard approach in asymmetric-information theory, is
spending resources on hiding information, which may be described theoretically as
the mirror image of not spending resources on disclosing information in a reliable
way.27
There are stronger forms of costly misinformation, though. For example, suppli-
ers may, and some do, actively spread information on exaggerated qualities of their
products or on qualities they do not have at all. Doing so is of course costly. Bischoff
25
Combining the search words “certification” and “bounded rationality” returns zero entries in
EconLit and one for a law journal contribution in SSRN (Becher 2009, p. 747). scholar.google
returns more entries, but none on the first pages really combines the two approaches. ISI Web of
Science returns one case study (Pelaez et al. 2010, p. 27) and the only theory-based paper by Pu
and Zhang (2016), Article No 953.
26
Pu and Zhang (2016).
27
Stahl and Strausz (2017) refer to this problem when comparing producer-purchased and con-
sumer-purchased certification, but their model excludes nearly all other problems discussed in the
current paper.
and Blaeschke28 published one of the few papers in which this social waste of
resources is studied explicitly. However, they do not apply their model to general
markets for experience or credence goods nor to certification, but refer to costly
‘window dressing’ of local politicians striving for funds from a central government.
Applying their approach of using resources either to improve quality itself or to
improve merely its presentation and describing the ensuing perception of quality by
a function of the two uses of resources to the case of producers would be straight
forward and provide a useful starting point for investigating certification in an envi-
ronment where such information-blurring activities exist. Nevertheless, existing
approaches to certification markets until now lack active deception of consumers as
a constitutive element. Understanding certification without accepting the existence
of this problem seems to neglect a major part of the problem.
7 Conclusions
This chapter has reviewed the literature on voluntary certification provided by pri-
vate agencies. Starting from the seminal model presented by Viscusi, the focus was
first on opportunistic behaviour of certifiers. Both collusion with the producer to be
certified and moral hazard of certifiers with respect to their error-reducing effort
have been discussed. It turns out that reputation of certifying agencies and govern-
ment regulation of inputs of certifiers are the only viable approaches to overcome
these problems—despite their imperfections due to economies of scale and scope in
reputation and the risk of abuse of regulation for restricting entry to the certification
market. From the theoretical perspective, reputation of certifiers is disappointing as
a solution to the problems insofar as high quality certification is but one equilibrium
among several others in most modelling approaches.
Besides problems of opportunism, much of the literature on certification explains
the causes and effects of minimum quality certification, which conceals much of the
information certifiers acquire when investigating the products to be certified. It turns
out that this form of certification is a result of profit maximization of certifiers being
contracted by producers. However, this need not be to the disadvantage of consum-
ers as the latter also derive information from the very fact that the producers decide
to apply for a certification, or that they do not. In addition, (boundedly rational)
consumers tend to understand information contained in minimum quality certifica-
tion more easily than full quality information.
Economic literature on certification provides many useful results, but it is far
from giving all answers one would desire for designing a good legal framework for
the certification market. Open questions that the last section of this chapter has
stressed are the discussion of preference heterogeneity of consumers with respect
to more than one quality dimension, the problems of bounded rationality and the
28
Bischoff and Blaeschke (2016), p. 344.
effects of active distortion of information by producers and certifiers, for example

in the form of costly window dressing, which may replace true quality
improvements.
References
Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The market for “Lemons”: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84, 488.
Albano, G. L., & Lizzeri, A. (2001). Strategic certification and provision of quality. International
Economic Review, 42, 267.
Becher, S. I. (2009). A ‘Fair Contracts’ approval mechanism: Reconciling consumer contracts and
conventional contract law. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 42, 747.
Biglaiser, G. (1993). Middlemen as experts. The RAND Journal of Economics, 24, 212.
Bischoff, I., & Blaeschke, F. (2016). Performance budgeting: Incentives and social waste from
window dressing. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 26, 344.
Buehler, B., & Schuett, F. (2014). Certification and minimum quality standards when some con-
sumers are uninformed. European Economic Review, 70, 493.
Darby, M. R., & Karni, E. (1973). Free competition and the optimal amount of fraud. The Journal
of Law & Economics, 16, 67.
Das, S. (2016). Certification under oligopolistic competition. Environmental Resource Economics,
65, 251.
Emons, W. (1997). Credence goods and fraudulent experts. The RAND Journal of Economics, 28,
107.
Farhi, E., Lerner, J., & Tirole, J. (2013). Fear of rejection? Tiered certification and transparency.
The RAND Journal of Economics, 44, 610.
Faulhaber, G. R., & Yao, D. A. (1989). “Fly-by-Night” firms and the market for product reviews.
The Journal of Industrial Economics, 38, 65.
Ganuza, J. J., Gomez, F., & Robles, M. (2016). Product liability versus reputation. The Journal of
Law, Economics, and Organization, 32, 213.
Green, E. J., & Porter, R. H. (1984). Noncooperative collusion under imperfect price information.
Econometrica, 52, 87.
Hvide, H. K. (2009). Oligopolistic certification. The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, 9(1),
Article id 5.
Kleiner, M. M. (2000). Occupational licensing. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14, 189.
Lerner, J., & Tirole, J. (2006). A model of forum shopping. The American Economic Review, 96,
1091.
Lizzeri, A. (1999). Information revelation and certification intermediaries. The RAND Journal of
Economics, 30, 214.
Nelson, P. (1970). Information and consumer behavior. Journal of Political Economy, 78, 311.
Pelaez, V., Aquino, D., Hofmann, R., & Melo, M. (2010). Implementation of a traceability and
certification system for non-genetically modified soybeans: The experience of Imcopa Co. in
Brazil. International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, 13(1), 27.
Peyrache, E., & Quesada, L. (2011). Intermediaries, credibility and incentives to collude. Journal
of Economics & Management Strategy, 20, 1099.
Pollrich, N., & Wagner, L. (2016). Imprecise information disclosure and truthful certification.
European Economic Review, 89, 345.
Pu, X., & Zhang, H. (2016). Voluntary certification of agricultural products in competitive mar-
kets: The consideration of boundedly rational consumers. Sustainability, 8(9), Article id 953.
Shapiro, C. (1986). Investment, moral hazard, and occupational licensing. Review of Economic
Studies, 53, 843.
Stahl, K., & Strausz, R. (2017). Certification and market transparency. Review of Economic
Studies, 84, 1842.
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Organization, 23, 45.
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Challenges for Responsible Certification
in Institutional Context: The Case
of Competition Law Enforcement
in Markets with Certification
Victoria I. Daskalova and Michiel A. Heldeweg
1 Certification as Regulation
How does certification relate to legally prescribed patterns of behaviour of states,

markets and civil society and how can a responsible contribution to the workings of
these patterns of behaviour be secured? Assuming that certification, at its core, refers
to a statement that a certain state of affairs meets a predefined norm, does certification
only add (legal) certainty to further legal relations, or does it impact on the nature and
pattern of these relations? We believe that because certification is regulation, its
mechanisms of standard-setting, monitoring and enforcement1 can and often do have
an immediate and profound bearing on basic rules and principles of modes of legal
governance, for example on competition law in market context, on the legality prin-
ciple in a public hierarchy context, and on relationships based on trust in a civil soci-
ety context. This contextual relevance of certification, as a significant regulatory
factor impacting on (basic rules and principles of) modes of legal governance, begs
the question what makes for responsible certification. This would be certification that,
upon its truth-value, is informative and capable of enhancing the functioning of these
modes of governance, such as by remedying knowledge gaps experienced by govern-
ment regulators and by market actors. However, in reality certification may exacer-
bate knowledge gaps and lead to additional distortions, thus leading to either
government failure or market failure. This contribution aims to demonstrate the
1
Black (2002). According to Black, regulation is ‘a focused and sustained attempt to alter the
behaviour of others according to defined standards or purposes with the intention of producing a
broadly identified outcome or outcomes, which may involve, as control, mechanisms of standard-
setting, information-gathering and behaviour-modification’.
V. I. Daskalova (*) · M. A. Heldeweg

Department of Governance and Technology for Sustainability, Faculty of Behavioral and
Management Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
e-mail: v.i.daskalova@utwente.nl; m.a.heldeweg@utwente.nl

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02499-4_3
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Title: The Akkra case
Author: Miriam Allen De Ford
Illustrator: Dan Adkins
Release date: November 22, 2023 [eBook #72197]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

1961
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AKKRA

CASE ***
Miriam de Ford has given a good deal
of thought to crime and criminology
of other times and spaces (see
Editorial). Now she turns her talents
to constructing a "true crime" of the
future—and its solution. Herewith,
then, a criminologist's lecture-report
on:
THE AKKRA CASE
By MIRIAM ALLEN de FORD
Illustrated by ADKINS
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories January 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Deliberate murder being so very rare a crime in our society, an
account of any instance of it must attract the attention not only of
criminologists but also of the general public. Very many of my
auditors must remember the Akkra case well, since it occurred only
last year. This, however, is the first attempt to set forth the bizarre
circumstances hitherto known only to the authorities and to a few
specialists.
On February 30 last, the body of a young girl was found under the
Central Park mobilway in Newyork I. She had been struck on the
head with some heavy object which had fractured her skull, and her
auburn hair was matted with congealed blood. Two boys illegally
trespassing on one of the old dirt roads in the park itself stumbled
upon the corpse. She was fully dressed, but barefoot, with her
socsandals lying beside her. An autopsy showed only one unusual
thing—she was a virgin, though she was fully mature.
Two hundred years ago, say, this would have been a case for the
homicide branch of the city police. Now, of course, there are no city
police, all local law enforcement being in the hands of the Federal
government, with higher supervision and appeal to the Interpol; and
since there has been no reported murder (except in Africa and
China, where this crime has not yet been entirely eradicated) for at
least 20 years, Fedpol naturally has no specialists in homicide.
Investigation therefore was up to the General Branch in Newyork
Complex I.
The murderer had stupidly broken off the welded serial number disc
from her wristlet—stupidly, because of course everybody's
fingerprints and retinal pattern are on file with Interpol from birth. It
was soon discovered that the victim was one Madolin Akkra, born in
Newyork I of mixed Irish, Siamese, and Swedish descent, aged 18
years and seven months. Since it is against the law for any minor
(under 25) to be gainfully employed, and there was no record of any
exemption-permit, she had necessarily to be a student. She was
found to be studying spaceship maintenance at Upper Newyork
Combined Technicum.
People who deride Fedpol and call it a useless anachronism don't
know what they are talking about. It is true that in our society criminal
tendencies are understood to be a disease, amenable to treatment,
not a free-will demonstration of anti-social proclivities. But it is also
true that every member of Fedpol, down to the merest rookie
policeman, is a trained specialist in some field, and that most of its
officers are graduate psychiatrists. As soon as Madolin Akkra's
identity was determined, it was easy to find out everything about her.
The circumstances surrounding her in life were sufficiently odd in
themselves. Her mother was dead, but she lived with her own father
and full younger sister in a small (only 20 stories and 80 living-units)
co-operative apartment house in the old district formerly called
Westchester, once an "exclusive" settlement but now considerably
run down, and populated for the most part by low-income families.
Few of the residents had more than one helicopter per family, and
many of them had to commute to their jobs or schools by public
copter. The building where the Akkras lived was shabby, its chrome
and plastic well worn, and showed the effects of a negligent local
upkeep system. The Akkras even prepared and ate some of their
meals in their own quarters—an almost unheard-of anachronism.
The father had served his 20 years of productive labor from 25 to 45,
and the whole family was therefore supported by public funds of one
sort or another. When the Fedpol officers commenced their
investigation by interviewing this man, they found him one of the
worst social throwbacks discovered in many years—doubtless a
prime reason for the bizarre misfortune which had overtaken his
misguided daughter. To begin with, the investigators wanted to know,
why had he not reported his daughter missing? To this, Pol Akkra
made the astonishing reply that the girl was old enough to know her
own business, and that he had never asked any questions as to
what she did! Everyone knows it is every adult's responsibility to
report any deviation by the young more serious than the mischievous
trespassing by the boys who had found Madolin Akkra's body, and
who at least had gone to Fedpol at once. The officers could get no
lead whatever from the girl's father.
To find the murderer, it was of first importance to establish the
background of this strange case. Access to the park is difficult—has
been difficult ever since, more than a century ago, the area became
a hunting-ground for thieves and hoodlums, and was transformed
into a cultivated forest and garden preserved for aesthetic reasons,
and to be viewed only from the mobilways above. (The boys who
found the body are, of course, proof that the sealing-off of the park is
not entirely effective—but surely only a daring and agile child could
insinuate himself under the thorn-set hedges surrounding the park,
or swing down to the tree-tops from the structure above.)
If the victim had been killed elsewhere, how was her body carried to
the spot where it was found? Both murderer and corpse would have
had to penetrate unobserved into an almost impenetrable area.
Could the body have been thrown from above? But if so, how could
the remains of a full-grown girl have been transported from either a
ground car or a copter on to the crowded mobilway, brightly lighted
all night long? She must have gone there alive, either under duress
or of her own accord.
The first and most natural question, to Fedpol, was: who did have
access to the park? The answer was, the gardeners. But the
gardeners were out: they were all robots, even their supervisor. No
robot is able to harm a human being. Moreover, no robot could have
brought the victim in from outside if she had been killed elsewhere.
The gardeners never leave the park, and they would repel any
strange robot from elsewhere who tried to enter it. And one could
hardly imagine a sane human being who would go to the park for a
rendezvous with a robot!
It was Madolin's little sister, Margret, who interrupted the futile

interrogation of the surly and resistant Pol Akkra and provided the
first clue. She caught the eye of the investigating officer, Inspector
Dugal Kazazian, and quietly went into the next room, where
Kazazian followed her after posting his assistant with the father.
"I promised Madolin I would never tell on her," she whispered, "but
now she's—now it doesn't matter." She had loved her sister; her
eyes were puffy from weeping. "She—she'd been going to Naturist
get-togethers."
Kazazian almost groaned aloud. He might have known—this was the
first time they had been linked with murder, but it seemed to him that
in almost every other affair he had investigated for the past few
years, the subversive Naturists somehow had crept in. And if he had
reflected, he would have suspected them already, since there seems
to be no school or college which does not harbor an underground
branch of these criminal lunatics.
I need hardly explain to my auditors who and what the Naturists are.
But to keep the record complete, let me say briefly that this
pernicious worldwide conspiracy, founded 50 years ago by the
notorious Ali Chaim Pertinuzzi, is engaged in an organized campaign
to tear down all the marvelous technical achievements of our
civilization. It pretends to believe that we should eat "natural" foods
and wear "natural" textiles instead of synthetics, walk instead of ride,
teach children the obsolete art of reading (reading what?—the
antique books preserved in museums?), make our own music,
painting, and sculpture instead of enjoying the exquisite products of
perfected machines, open up all parks and the few remaining rural
preserves to campers, hunters and fishers (if any specimens worth
hunting can be found outside zoos), and what they call "hikers"—in a
word, go back to the confused, reactionary world of our ancestors.
From this hodgepodge of "principles" it is a natural transition to
political and economic subversion. No wonder that the information
that Madolin Akkra had been corrupted by this vile outfit sent a chill
down Inspector Kazazian's spine.
It explained a great deal, however. The Naturists profess to oppose

our healthy system of sexual experimentation, and Madolin had been
a virgin. The weird family situation, and her father's attitude both
toward her and toward the Fedpol, aroused suspicion that he too
was affiliated with the Naturists, not simply that Madolin had flirted
with the outer edges of the treasonable organization, as a "fellow-
seeker," without her father's knowledge.
Suppose the girl, fundamentally decent and ethically-minded, had
revolted against the false doctrine and threatened to betray its
advocates? Then she might have been killed to silence her—and
what more likely than that, as a piece of brazen defiance, her
murdered corpse should have been deposited in the only bit of
"natural" ground still remaining in the Newyork area?
But how, and by whom?
The first step, of course, was to fling a dragnet around all known or
suspected Naturists in the district. In a series of flying raids they
were rounded up; and since there no longer exist those depositories
for offenders formerly known as prisons, they were kept
incommunicado in the psychiatric wards of the various hospitals. For
good measure, Pol Akkra was included. Margret, at 13, was old
enough to take care of herself.
Next, all Madolin's classmates at the Technicum, the operators of her
teach-communicators, and members of other classes with whom it
was learned she had been on familiar terms, were subjected to an
intensive electronic questioning. (Several of these were themselves
discovered to be tainted with Naturism, and were interned with the
rest.) One of the tenets of Naturism is a return to the outworn system
of monogamy, and the questioning was directed particularly to the
possibility that Madolin had formed half of one of the notorious
Naturist "steady couples," who often associate without or before
actual mating. But day after day the investigators came up with not
the slightest usable lead.
Please do not think I am underrating Fedpol. Nothing could have
been more thorough than the investigation they undertook. But this
turned out in the end to be a case which by its very nature
obfuscated the normal methods of criminological science. Fedpol
itself has acknowledged this, by its formation in recent months of the
Affiliated Assistance Corps, made up of amateurs who volunteer for
the detection of what are now called Class X crimes—those so far off
the beaten path that professionals are helpless before them.
For it was an amateur who solved Madolin Akkra's murder—her own
little sister. When Margret Akkra reaches the working age of 25 she
will be offered a paid post as Newyork Area Co-ordinator of the AAC.
Left alone by her father's internment, Margret began to devote her
whole time out of school hours to the pursuit of the person or
persons who had killed her sister. She had told Kazazian all she
actually knew; but that was only her starting-point. Though she
herself, as she had told the Inspector, believed that the murder might
be traced to Madolin's connection with the Naturist (and though she
probably at least suspected her father to be involved with them also),
she did not confine herself to that theory, as the Fedpol, with its
scientific training, was obliged to do.
Concealed under a false floor in her father's bedroom—mute
evidence of his Naturist affiliation—she found a cache of printed
books—heirlooms which should long ago have been presented to a
museum for consultation by scholars only. They dated back to the
20th century, and were of the variety then known as "mystery
stories." Margret of course could not read them. But she
remembered now, with revulsion, how, when she and Madolin were
small children, their mother had sometimes (with windows closed
and the videophone turned off) amused them by telling them ancient
myths and legends that by their very nature Margret now realized
must have come from these contraband books.
Unlike her father and her sister, and apparently her mother as well,
Margret Akkra had remained a wholesome product of a civilized
education. She had nothing but horror and contempt for the
subversive activities in the midst of which, she knew now, she had
grown up. The very fact, which became plain to her for the first time,
that her parents had lived together, without changing partners, until
her mother had died, was evidence enough of their aberration.
But, stricken to the heart as the poor girl was, she could not cease to
love those she had always loved, or to be diverted from her
resolution to solve her sister's murder. Shudder as she might at the
memory of those subversive books, she yet felt they might
inadvertently serve to assist her.
It was easy to persuade the school authorities that her shock and
distress over Madolin's death had slowed up her conscious mind,
and to get herself assigned to a few sessions with the electronic
memory stimulator. It took only two or three to bring back in detail the
suppressed memories, and to enable her to extrapolate from them.
One feature of these so-called "mysteries" that came back to her

struck Margret with especial force—the frequent assertion that
murderers always return to the scene of their crime. She decided
that she too must plant herself at the spot where her sister's body
had been found, and lie in wait for the returning killer.
It would be useless to try to obtain official permission, but she was
only 13, as lean and agile as any other child, and if boys could evade
the hedges and the robot gardeners, so could she. The audiovids
had displayed plenty of pictures of the exact scene, and Margret
knew where to find it. But an inspection of the hedges showed her
that it would be easier for her to get in from above, at night—a likelier
time also for her prey.
She located a place where the trees grew almost to the mobilway
and shaded a section of it between the lamps. Perched on the stand-
pave and watching for a pause in the stream of gliders-by, she
dropped lightly into a tree and climbed down to the park beneath.
Hiding from the gardeners, she made her way to the bushes where
the boys had discovered Madolin.
For nearly a week, fortified by Sleepnomer pills, Margret spent every
moment after dark in this hideaway. It was a long, nerve-wracking
vigil: the close contact with leaves and grass, the sound of the wind
in the trees, the unaccustomed darkness away from the lights above,
the frightening approach of wild squirrels and rabbits and even birds,
the necessity to stay concealed from passing robots, kept her on
edge. But stubbornly she persisted. And at last she was rewarded.
It was not late—only about 20 o'clock—when she heard a scramble
and bump not far from her own means of access to the park. It was
not the first time since her watch began that she had heard other
adventurers, invariably small and rather scared boys who dared one
another to walk for a few feet along the dirt paths, then in a panic
rushed back the way they had come. But this time the steps came
directly toward her—human footsteps, not the shuffle of a robot.
Hidden behind a bush, Margret saw them approach—two boys of
about her own age. And then, with a sickening lurch of her heart, she
recognized them. She had seen them, acclaimed as heroes, on the
videoscreen. They were the two who had found Madolin. She could
hear every word they said.
"Come on," one of them urged in a hoarse whisper. "There's nothing
to be afraid of."
"Yes, there is," the other objected. "Ever since then, they've got the
gardeners wired to describe and report anybody they find inside the
park."
"I don't care. We've got to find it. Give me the beamer."
Margret crouched behind the thickest part of the shrubbery, her infra-
red camera at the alert. The tape-attachment was already activated.
The second boy still held back. "I told you then," he muttered, "that
we shouldn't have reported it at all. We should have got out of here
and never said a word to anyone."
"We couldn't," the first boy said, shocked. "It would have been anti-
social. Haven't you ever learned anything in school?"
"Well, it's anti-social to kill somebody, too, isn't it?"
Margret pressed the button on the camera. Enlarged enough, even
the identification discs on the boys' wristlets would show.
"How could we guess there was a human being there, except us?
What was she doing here, anyway? Come on, Harri, we've got to
find that thing. It's taken us long enough to get a chance to sneak in
here."
"Maybe they've found it already," said Harri fearfully.
"No, they haven't; if they had, they'd have taken us in as soon as
they dusted the fingerprints."
"All right, it's not anywhere on the path. Put the beamer on the
ground where it will shine in front of us, and let's get down on our
stomachs and hunt underneath the bushes."
Grabbing her camera, Margret jumped to her feet and dashed past
the startled boys. She heard a scream—that would be Harri—and
then their feet pounding after her. But she had a head start, and her
eyes were more accustomed to the dark than theirs could be. She
reached a tree, shinnied up it, jumped from one of its limbs to
another on a higher tree beneath the mobilway, chinned herself up,
and made her way out safely.
She went straight to Fedpol headquarters and asked for Inspector
Kazazian.
The frightened boys were picked up at once. They were brought into
headquarters, where they had been praised and thanked before, and
as soon as they saw the pictures and heard the tape-recording they
confessed everything.
That night, they said, they were being initiated into one of those
atavistic fraternities which it seems impossible for the young to
outgrow or the authorities to suppress. As part of their ordeal, they
had been required to sneak into Central Park and to bring back as
proof of their success a captured robot gardener. Between them they
had decided that the only way they could ever get their booty would
be to disassemble the robot, for though it could not injure them, if
they took hold of it, its communication-valve would blow and the
noise would bring others immediately; so they had taken along what
seemed to them a practical weapon—a glass brick pried out of the
back of a locker in the school gym. Hurled by a strong and practiced
young arm, it could de-activate the robot's headpiece.
When, as they waited in the darkness for a gardener to appear, they
saw a figure moving about in the shrubbery bordering the path, one
of them—neither would say which one it was—let fly. To their horror,
instead of the clang of heavy glass against metal, they heard a
muffled thud as the brick struck flesh and bone. They started to run
away. But after a few paces they forced themselves to return.
It was a girl, and the blow had knocked her flat. Her head was
bleeding badly and she was moaning. Terrified, they knelt beside
her. She gasped once and lay still. One of the boys laid a trembling
hand on her breast, the other seized her wrist. There was no heart-
beat and there was no pulse. On an impulse, the boy holding her
wrist wrenched away her identification disc.
Panic seized them, and they dashed away, utterly forgetting the
brick, which at their first discovery one of them had had the foresight
to kick farther into the shrubbery, out of view. Sick and shaking, they
made their way out of the park and separated. The boy who had the
disc threw it into the nearest sewer-grating.
The next day, after school, they met again and talked it over. Finally
they decided they must go to Fedpol and report; but to protect
themselves they would say only that they had found a dead body.
Day after day, they kept seeing and hearing about the case on the
videaud, and pledged each other to silence. Then suddenly one of
the boys had a horrible thought—they had forgotten that the brick
would show their fingerprints!... They had come desperately to
search for it when Margret overheard them. Kazazian's men found it
without any difficulty; it had been just out of the gardeners' regular
track.
In view of the accidental nature of the whole affair, and the boys' full
confession, they got off easy. They were sentenced to only five
years' confinement in a psychiatric retraining school.
The suspects against whom nothing could be proved were released
and kept under surveillance. Pol Akkra, and all the proved Naturists,
were sentenced to prefrontal lobotomies. Margret Akkra, in return for
her help in solving the mystery, secured permission to take her father
home with her. A purged and docile man, he was quite capable of
the routine duties of housekeeping.
The killing of Madolin Akkra was solved. But one question remained:
how and why had she been in Central Park at all?
The answer, when it came, was surprising and embarrassingly
simple. And this is the part that has never been told before.
Pol Akkra, a mere simulacrum of the man he had been, no longer
knew his living daughter or remembered his dead one. But in the
recesses of his invaded brain some faint vestiges of the past
lingered, and occasionally and unexpectedly swam up to his
dreamlike consciousness.
One day he said suddenly: "Didn't I once know a girl named
Madolin?"
"Yes, father," Margret answered gently, tears in her eyes.
"Funny about her." He laughed his ghastly Zombie chuckle. "I told
her that was a foolish idea, even if it was good Nat—Nat-something
theory."
"What idea was that?"
"I—I've forgotten," he said vaguely. Then he brightened. "Oh, yes, I
remember. Stand barefoot in fresh soil for an hour in the light of the
full moon and you'll never catch cold again.
"She was subject to colds, I think." (About the only disease left we
have as yet no cure for.) He sighed. "I wonder if she ever tried it."
THE END
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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Part II Success and Shortcomings of Certification Systems

Part III Liability for Negligent Certification

1 The Theme of the Book

Certification means the confirmation of compliance with a pre-defined standard

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

products, services, or management are certified, as in the case of credit rating or of

2 The Structure of the Book

as a potential solution. Carola Glinski describes the certification of biofuels under

3 The Individual Chapters

3.1 Part 1: Foundations

In his chapter on ‘Certification as solution to the asymmetric information prob-

grant of such a permission, or where certification is part of public enforcement or a

3.2 Part 2: Success and Shortcomings of Certification Systems

3.3 Part 3: Liability for Negligent Certification

If a ship that has been so certified is involved in an incident causing damage to a

‘Certification Bodies – Trust, Accountability, Liability’ was the title of a bilateral

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Certification of products, services and even certification agencies aims at various

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between producers and certifiers. Section 5 studies certification of reaching

2  arkets for Search Goods, Experience Goods

3 The Basic Viscusi Model

Obviously, Viscusi’s model was a first step towards understanding certification,

4 Opportunistic Certifying Agencies

The simple-most way to allow for opportunistic certifying agencies is to assume

5 Certification of Minimum Quality

Leaving aside the aforementioned problems of incomplete information of the certi-

The consequences of minimum quality certification on producers’ incentives to

effects of active distortion of information by producers and certifiers, for example

Victoria I. Daskalova and Michiel A. Heldeweg

How does certification relate to legally prescribed patterns of behaviour of states,

V. I. Daskalova (*) · M. A. Heldeweg

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 23

Title: The Akkra case

Author: Miriam Allen De Ford

Illustrator: Dan Adkins

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AKKRA

THE AKKRA CASE

By MIRIAM ALLEN de FORD

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

It was Madolin's little sister, Margret, who interrupted the futile

It explained a great deal, however. The Naturists profess to oppose

One feature of these so-called "mysteries" that came back to her

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

Part II Success and Shortcomings of Certification Systems

Part III Liability for Negligent Certification

1 The Theme of the Book

2 The Structure of the Book

3 The Individual Chapters

3.1 Part 1: Foundations

3.2 Part 2: Success and Shortcomings of Certification Systems

3.3 Part 3: Liability for Negligent Certification

2 arkets for Search Goods, Experience Goods

3 The Basic Viscusi Model

4 Opportunistic Certifying Agencies

5 Certification of Minimum Quality