December 22 Transcription & script Brian HILL
Hi and welcome to the final Breakthroughs of 2025. I hope you’ve been enjoying these monthly podcasts on some cutting edge research in the world of business and economy. Today, our HEC guest discusses his approach to achieving sustainability goals without sacrificing competitiveness. He’s the author of a new policy paper which shifts the focus of disclosure rules from companies to products. And it’s pretty timely: it comes at a moment when Europe reaches a provisional agreement to simplify sustainability reporting and due diligence requirements. Brussels says it’s to boost EU competitiveness. Well, this research could offer a third way. And the guest behind it is…
So hello, I'm Brian Hill, Research Director at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) and Professor in the Economics and Decision Sciences Department at Astro City, Paris.
YOUTUBE EXTRACT 01
We promised businesses and stakeholders that we would finalize the omnibus process before the end of the year.
MIKE
Jörgen Warborn, rapporteur of the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee on December 16 this year … 
And today, the Parliament and the Council have delivered on that. This is also a good day because we deliver today. We fight for a better business climate for everyone. A good day for Europe? 
Thank you very much, rapporteur, and I wish you all a wonderful afternoon and a Merry Christmas.
Extract 2
Are you satisfied with your understanding of sustainability? This is The Sustainability Journey. And today I'm very pleased to have an author, a change maker with a new tool, the Sustainability Scorecard. I'm very pleased to have here the co-author of “Together”, with Paul and Astar, Urvashi Batumangar. Thank you so much, Urvashi, for being here.
Thank you for having me.
Urvashi,I read the book and it's amazing and fantastic.I learned so much and it.
Daniel Brown/reporter:

Podcaster Samuele Tini and his guest Urvashi Bhatnagar. Her 2022 book The Sustainability scorecard underlines how such a notion for production-level reporting could help both business and the environment. But economics professor Brian Hill has taken his research that step further. In his recent policy paper “Squaring Disclosure Regulation and Competitiveness”, the HEC academic lays out a hands-on framework for digital, standardised scorecards. It’s given rise to an important Project Syndicate article I recommend you to read, by the way. These scorecards are designed to leverage both upstream data and information gaps. Brian’s research draws on interviews with EU policymakers, auditors, CSR directors and sustainability tech developers. 
He’s been working on “smart product-level disclosure” for some time. I met him in early December and first asked him to describe this disclosure for us:
Hill:
Yeah, so smart product level disclosure was something that we proposed in a recent (HEC) Sustainability and Organizations Institute policy paper, of which I was the lead author. And the basic idea is that each product comes accompanied with digital standardized scorecard with key objective sustainability indicators. So there are four fundamental ingredients. One is about the locus of information, product level. One is the fact that it applies to all products.The standardization is important so you can compare across products and that the information is objective and hence verifiable or verified.that you can scan with your telephone.For instance, you could get it from the barcode or from a QR code.
So the idea is something like, think of the nutritional tables on the back of your cereal packet.They are provided at the product level. They're provided for all goods of a certain type. They're standardized. It's going to be the same entries on all of them.And their objective is that sort of information, except on sustainability, and it doesn't have to be printed on the packet.You could get itby scanning barcodes or QR codes or whatever IDs.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
And it's pretty much the same for a customer and a purchasing manager.
Hill:
That's right.Every product has some sort of product ID, even if it's a B2B product.So QR codes or any form of ID could get that information, yes.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
I decided to talk to four HEC students who are also consumers, of course.And after describing your scorecard, I asked them the following.If every product they buy, it could be clothes, phones, food and so on, had a simple sustainability and social score that they could see, you know, from A to E, I think it is, instantly by, as I said, scanning a QR code, in what situations do they think they would actually use it?And in which moments would they probably ignore it?
And here are some of the answers.
VOXPOP 01
To be honest, I'd probably pay attention to it more often than not, because usually I feel like the products that are more sustainable and more responsible tend to be of better quality as well, which is what I pay attention to a lot.So I think it's somewhat of an indicator.I try to do that as much as I can myself right now.So I try to look for products that are quite itself, like sustainably harvested.
 2
So I think most of the time, if it's visible, I would definitely take a look at it to choose different same type of product. What different type of situation I would not choose it I think for very important purchase.  If it's not really a factor of decision, maybe I will not use it.But for most of the daily life product, I think I will use it.
 3
I mean, I will use it for any type of product I buy because we are used to buying things that we don't know where they come from.And we do not have this feeling of accountability when we buy it.But once you see it, you have to buy in consequence.So I will have used it in any ways.In all circumstances.
4
I will use it in the same situation.I'm using the Nutritional card when I'm in physical supermarket, not online, and I have a different choice and the price is quite the same.I love to check the ABC score, and depending on this, I make my choice.And when I'm buying online, I'm less regarding about those factors.

Daniel Brown/reporter: Brian, your reaction?
Hill:
At least four people seem to be sensitive to sustainability credentials if they're provided. Let's just note that a scorecard is not the same thing as a nutrition card. So, it's just the same way as the nutritional table in the back of your cereal packet isn't the same thing as the nutri-score. So the proposal is not to give sustainability scores A to E. It's to give full objective sustainability information.
That said, scorecards can support scores like the NutriScore or some scores you can get in apps like Yuka if you want to keep the analogy with the Nutrition table. But they can do much more, as I hope we'll discuss.
Daniel Brown/reporter: 
And where did this idea germinate?
Hill:
This idea, as I said, was set down in a policy paper that came out in October, and I hope that the  to the policy paper will be in the program notes. And it brings together a range of more or less disconnected ideas to confront a bunch of related challenges. So as such, it's going to draw on several things. It's going to draw on some of my previous theoretical and experimental work on using information and consumer attitudes to internalize social externalities. It draws on discussions with some colleagues who are also co-authors of the report, such as Stefano Lovo and Christos Shi. on carbon budgeting across and information across supply chains. And it draws on work of myself and colleagues in this decision sciences department and beyond on uncertainty, how to communicate uncertainty, how people act in the face of uncertainty.
And when you're talking about uncertainty, you're basically talking about more or less information. 

VIDEO EXTRACT
03 EU retreats from climate ambitions in the name of business.mp3
Decarbonization is a massive transformation for all of our industries…..
MIKE
  Wopka Hoekstra, broadcast by CNBC International on December 18:

…… clearly including for the car sector. And this is equal, or maybe even more than equal, to a new industrial revolution in terms of the scale and in terms of the transformative impact that the whole thing will have.
The move was widely hailed by automakers, including BMW and Mercedes, who called it a step in the right direction.  The EU has long claimed it is a leader in green initiatives, with its Green Deal introduced back in 2019 and then approved in early 2020 as a landmark moment. But a lot has changed in six years. For instance, the EU has softened its approach to climate policies as it faced external headwinds such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and more recently, U.S.tariffs.  Just last week, European ministers and the EU parliament agreed a deal to simplify sustainability reporting and due diligence requirements.
The Danish Minister for European Affairs, Marie Bjerk, said the new requirements were aimed at boosting competitiveness in the bloc.EU climate ministers also agreed a compromise to cut emissions by 90% from 1990 levels by the year of 2040. But the move was seen as a step down from previous ambitions, given the many sweeteners offered to the several member states.
JINGLE
Daniel Brown/reporter:
So This proposal comes at a significant moment for Europe. And in your policy paper, you argue that EU sustainability disclosure has reached a policy crossroads with competitiveness and reporting burden at the centre of a backlash. Again, if you had to explain it to a non-specialist listener like myself, what do you think is really at stake in this omnibus debate which the EU had recently? I mean, how would you frame it in just a few sentences?
HILL:
So what's really in stake and how it's actually framed, they may not be the same thing, but I'm not here to speculate. So here is how it is framed. The discourse is very simple. Current approaches to regulation, which are at the center of the debate nowadays, so we're talking the 1st of December 2025, the omnibus to CSRD, all that type of stuff. Current approaches focus on reporting at the firm level. That basically means that if it's a burden on firms, it's only going to be a burden on those firms within the EU jurisdiction where they can impose their reporting requirements. Or they can try and impose them for foreign firms, but they do less well, right? So the idea is it's a competitive advantage. That's the position, that's the suggestion. It's a competitive advantage because the reporting at the firm level could be burdensome. Then there's a question about how burdensome it actually is. You ask different people, you ask different firms, you're going to need different replies. Typically, you hear people say things like tracing indicators down the supply chain, even in scope 3, even if there's due diligence that's been, that's about to be rolled back or is in the process of being rolled back. That's often signaled as something which is particularly hard. 
Some people also talk about narrative disclosures. That's essentially the situation. A burden that's supposed to be only, or at least disproportionately on European firms of a certain size. Many people, see a hard trade-off between Europe's competitiveness and these strong sustainability rules that have been built up over the years.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
Why do you think shifting disclosure from firms to products is the most promising way to reconcile this tension and level the playing field between the EU and non-EU producers?
HILL:
Yeah, so I mean, you're completely right, Daniel, that's exactly how it's framed, as a choice between either competitiveness on the one hand or sustainability on the other. But if you have this rock and a hard place, then product level reporting is essentially a no-brainer. Any infrastructure or regulation ecosystem that involves all products is going to apply equally to all producers of those products, wherever they are, wherever they're domiciled, EU or not EU. The reason I think why product level reporting hasn't been front and center is that there is a remaining challenge and that is to design an ecosystem for product level sustainability reporting or sustainability information provision that allows companies, it's usable by companies, that allows them to report and then moves us collectively closer to our sustainability ambitions And that's what the policy paper tries to do.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
Brian Hill, one of the most attractive parts of your proposal is distributed reporting, and that's where each firm only reports on its own operations, and it draws the rest from suppliers' scorecards. Can you walk us through this concrete supply chain example that shows how this actually reduces scope 3 pain points and makes automation feasible, especially for smaller firms? Scope 3 emissions are all indirect emissions (not included in scope 2) that occur in the value chain of the reporting company, including both upstream and downstream emissions.
HILL
Okay, so let's just take a very simple example. So imagine you take a car manufacturer, for instance, and just take one indicator, so take CO2 emissions. Now, the car manufacturer can measure the emissions in its factory, even if it's a small car manufacturer or a small manufacturer of some product. It doesn't even need specifically to put in sensors to measure that, because in many industries, it can look up existing sites like La Dene in France (????), provides a web portal where they can basically explain what sort of processes they're using, how much they're producing, and it will tell them and give them an estimate of their CO2 emissions. So on site, we know how that measurement goes. The scope 3 issue is how they incorporate and how they get information on the emissions associated to their input products. And in fact, if you look at some of the CSRD reports, which came out last year, because the first phase of reporting started last year, you're going to find that quite a lot of firms are going to be promising that they're going to ask their suppliers for CO2 emissions, but they typically don't get those CO2 emissions. And they're not asking their suppliers for CO2 emissions at the level of the supplying firm. They're asking for CO2 emissions at the level of the product. 
So, the suggestion is when this car manufacturer purchases and ships over a chip or a card or a metal required for a particular thing, that's going to come with its own scorecard with the CO2. When the purchase goes through their accounting system, that CO2 can be automatically brought along with it, can be added to the emissions from all the other input products, brought the same way. and add it to the emissions that the company is going to calculate for its own activities in its own factory.
What's important to note is that the supplier can do precisely the same thing. So the chip producer can do precisely the same thing, asking its suppliers for precisely the same information associated to the product and automatically bring it through, and they're going to have that. And not only that, because we have this scorecard system, so everyone is used to the idea these scorecards come with a product and people at the end are going to be looking at them. The car manufacturer is going to have more weight when it asks not just a supplier, but a supplier, supplier, and a supplier, supplier, supplier, and a supplier, supplier, supplier for that sort of information. Because one of the problems that firms have when we've been talking to them is they can get their Tier One to give some information, but it's harder to go further up. But now somebody's tier One is now going to become the Tier eZro, right? And just to finish off, clearly I've just taken this example on CO2 emissions, but you can say the same thing on social indicators.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
Brian, you also proposed propagated transparency using interval rate ranges when data are missing instead of pretending the gap isn't there. What does behavioral research tell us about how people react to such uncertainty ranges?
HILL:
Yeah, so I mean, A first reaction to my answer to the previous question is, well, these supply chains are going to go outside the EU or all across the world, and maybe people aren't going to want to report. So the scorecard is essentially going to be empty. And the propagated transparency proposal is, well, if there's an empty scorecard, if an indicator is not provided, then it will be automatically, as you said, replaced by an interval range according to the product type. and the characteristics of the producer, where they are, how big they are, so on and so forth. This means that the distributed reporting system costlessly and automatically extends to the end of the supply chain, right? Even when the supplier doesn't provide that information, there is something there instead, which is going to be this interval. That's the kind of transparency about the lack of information. Propagated, this information will be propagated up, so in the same way as they're going to be taken in; The car manufacturer is going to be taking in precise CO2 emissions from one input product. They might just take an interval from the other and it will pass that along in its calculations. So the uncertainty, which is represented by this interval, is going to be visible to the end user. 
So just to answer your question, why is this important? Well, behavioral research tells us two things. Firstly, to use the Ponzi term, there's something called uncertainty aversion. A Ponzi scheme is a fraud designed to give investors the impression that an investment is profitable. In a Ponzi scheme, the fraudster pays early investors with money that is thought to be profits from the business.
When people are explicitly told there's a degree of uncertainty, ceteris paribus (?????????); they tend to prefer alternatives with no such uncertainty or with less such uncertainty. Secondly, we're in a strategic situation where at the end of the day, we might have a choice between two goods. We know that each of these goods, all of the firms involved in those goods, could have filled in those scorecards. We see the one good, many of the firms haven't. The other good, many of the firms have. Well, that basically… alarm bells are going to ring. If you're not providing the information, people are typically going to be suspicious.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
What are you hiding?
Présentateur 1
That's right, exactly. So when, if you can put silence under the rug, people aren't going to notice it. But when it's explicitly there and people's attention are drawn to it and they have the expectation of seeing something and they see another product where it is there, that's typically taken as a negative signal.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
Now, law often comes in very quickly. So why do you feel this design can push companies to disclose more without adding new legal obligations?
HILL:
Yeah, so in a certain sense, what I've just said in my previous answer to the previous question, my answer to the previous question is people don't like uncertainty, especially in these sorts of strategic situations. So when information isn't provided, it's a blemish, it's a black mark, it's a bad signal. So if a firm can be more precise and can have a sustainability performance, which isn't too bad, that's going to be a competitive advantage. When some firms see that, they're going to start making an effort to report. The more firms provide products with more disclosure, the higher the incentive is going to be on other firms to disclose their information and to make sure their performance is such that they're not embarrassed to disclose that information. And that's the sort of policy properties we should be looking for, I would suggest, in policies that try to navigate, kind of obtain our sustainability ambitions whilst navigating all of the problems of competitivity in the world today. We would like policies where there are incentives, and these incentives are the same for all products, incentives towards sustainability where the entry cost is low. So, you basically can stay silent, you just have to pay the price. And where this incentivization pushes both for transparency and for performance and sustainability measures.

JINGLE


Daniel Brown/reporter:
In the Project Syndicate article I mentioned at the very beginning of this podcast, you liken product scorecards to nutrition tables for sustainability, like the ones that we see on all food products. These have apps and labels built on top of them rather than embedded in regulation itself. What advantages though does this separation between raw data and value-laded labels give regulators, firms and civil society at large?
HILL:
Yeah, so I think there are two sorts of, two families of advantages. So, there are practical advantages on the one hand and principled advantages. So let's just start with practical advantages. We just said if you wanted to calculate the CO2 emissions of a product, what you need is your input isn't the CO2 emissions of the supplier that's supplying that input product. You want the CO2 emissions of the product, of the input product, right? Labels aren't going to help you there, right? One label that kind of summarizes CO2 and biodiversity and respect for human rights in the supply chain isn't going to cut it because you need more granular information. So the distributive reporting approach works because there are these objective non-aggregated indicators, right? So scorecards, not all put together in one label. Working with labels basically means asking each firm to look down its own supply chain itself, right? And that's what's so clumsy and costly about the current system, right? It's just a bad way of designing an information system. So that's the practical side. 
On the principle side, I think that a lot of thinking about sustainability information, specifically the product level, but also arguably at the firm level as well, suffers from several myths that we discuss in the policy proposal. And one of the myth that for product, for sustainability information to be effective the format in which the information is provided has to coincide with the format in which it's used. And that, I mean, it's easy to see this is a myth because what happens when you have multiple users? What happens - we've just seen that scorecards can be useful for firms when they want to report - but we started talking about the fact that maybe consumers might be sensitive to this information. It's unclear that they both need it in the same format, right? 
So one principle reason is the way to allow multiple users to profit from this information is by putting it in a format where it's most flexible for the multiple users. And that, a scorecard does much better than a label. And the second principle reason is that when you put things together in a label, you're trying to take a whole bunch of sustainability criteria. So we've talked about some environmental ones, CO2 emissions, biodiversity impacts, but we can also talk about things like wage inequality. We can talk about human rights violations in the supply chain. We can talk about gender. We can talk about a whole bunch. You want to put that together in a label or even just four labels, kind of four criteria for each one. You're basically, you basically have to make judgments about what is more important, right? Are they all equally important? CO2 more important than human rights? Is human rights more important than CO2? So on and so forth. Now these things, again, to use the philosophy, decision science-y term, those are value judgments, right? They're not judgments about the way the world is They’re judgments about the way you think it is, what your objective is. If you're faced with a trade-off between some environmental property and some social property, how would you trade them off? Now, separating these, providing the factual information in the scorecard and leaving those value judgments for users, be they governments or consumers, in a certain sense, is leaving the judgments to the right people. They should be judgments which are made by the users, not made by the people who perform the label, right? 
So you can imagine an ecosystem where on the base of the scorecards, you can have either one app with several settings or several different apps, one from the International Labor Organization that's going to tell people all of the all of these product with these characteristics. It does this well on human rights, right? Or you can imagine another one from Greenpeace kind of translating the environment. You can imagine one by Oxfam, you can imagine one by, you can imagine one from MAGA. Anyway, you can imagine one from any, which corresponds to a particular value judgment. They're all based on the same objective facts that are just helping consumers understand, kind of, consumers are going to decide which of these value judgments are close to them, which of these value conceptions of the world are close to them. And I might just add that separating out the fact part from the value judgment, one potential reason why there might be a lack of trust or some skepticism towards existing labels, maybe even existing sustainability discourses among some parts of the population, is that people sense that there are other people who are making judgments on their behalf about what's important. The idea of separating the scorecards from the labels puts those judgments on the lap of the people who should be making them and should have the freedom to make them the way they want. Citizens, consumers, so on and so forth.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
Well, speaking of citizens and consumers, I wanted to go back to our HEC students. I was curious to know if price could have an impact on their decisions in terms of the products that they choose.In other words, I asked them to imagine two similar products. One had clearly better sustainability social scores, but was a bit more expensive or slightly less cool to have.And here are a few of the answers I had.
VOXPOP 02
 Student 1
I mean, it really depends on the difference, if it's just the price or if there's some other difference as well. Obviously, I will try to pick the better rated one, just because most likely I'll be in a better position per se to do that. So, I think unsafe is just the price, not an issue per se.
Student 2
I think I will choose the product which has the best score. But if the other is not as sustainable as the first product, I think even if it is less cool, I will turn towards the most ecological product because I think it is a factor of decision that is more important to me.
Student 3
If you really, really want it, you will have to pay more and it will be like a normal product. But if it's more expensive and you don't really like it, even though it has a better score, like you will not buy it, I think.
Student 4
Sometimes I think it depends on the industry. For example, for fashion, I love to wear more trendy things, even if I know it's less good for all the sustainability, etc. But for example, for other sectors like home care project, etc., I prefer to pay higher price to have better quality project, as for nutrition, when it came to health, the price is not a problem.
_____________________________________________
Daniel Brown/reporter:
Brian, there was a fashionista struggling with some dualities. I think being cool versus being, well, healthy in general. Your thoughts about these students' reactions? Hold on. These students' reactions.
HILL:
Yeah, so, students, consumers, firms, governments, they're clearly sustainability, environmental or social considerations will have to be traded off against other considerations, right? Price, quality, fashion. It would be extreme to ask kind of to sacrifice everything for a modest sustainability improvement or to focus entirely on sustainability. Just taking another example: when when you're talking about someone who's having trouble making ends meet, right? And the proposal is definitely not to do that. The only thing the proposal does is it reveals what trade-offs are there, what trade-offs are available. Now, what counts for whether it's going to work is how much people are willing to pay, in financial terms or maybe in fashion terms, for a given sustainability improvement, right? So how much more expensive or how much less cool are they willing to have for a particular improvement in sustainability? And this is typically going to be a question of degree. It's not going to be, it's not going to be black and white. 
Now, I think more work is needed on this, but I've kind of looked at this question in the case of one social characteristic in an economic model. And it turns out that what really isn't (a question of) whether you're willing to give up an awful lot for a little more sustainability. It's how many people are willing to give up a little bit for a big improvement in sustainability. If lots of people are willing to give up a little bit for a big improvement in sustainability, and I have another empirical paper suggesting that they are, then that's enough to improve sustainability performance at the society level.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
The policy paper, Brian Hill, argues that smart product level disclosure can cover not only environmental indicators, but also social ones. And you've mentioned a few before. But there's also forced labor, wage inequalities. What kind of simple indicators do you see as most robust, if you can use that word, on the social side?
HILL:
Yes, so Some, the social side is typically considered as a more difficult one to measure. Rightly or wrongly. Some bits in the environmental side are also very difficult to measure. So let me just start with the obvious. Some things are easy, relatively easy to measure. So for example, wage inequality is something that's essentially more or less already published from most public firms, both in the US and Europe. So that's something which is relatively easy to measure. You can probably say similar things about gender inequality. Cases which are more difficult are going to be things like human rights violations or respect for human rights along the supply chain. And there, a little bit more imagination is required in constructing robust measures. So we provided an example in the policy paper drawing on work that we did in the context of a clinic with six HEC students, our colleague Charles Autheman, people in the Impact Company Lab and the Inclusive Economy Centre and Schneider Electric, where we used as our indicator the percentage of workers guaranteed to be free from forced labor in the supply chain. And you can do this for anything. We used a percentage of workers guaranteed to be free from forced labor in the supply chain, or you could do similar things. We also looked at percentage of workers guaranteed to (have decent) working conditions, living up to certain health and safety standards in the supply chain. These are indicators that are relatively robust. They're pretty easy to define with a sort of product level system going up the supply chain, which I've been talking about. They're relatively easy to measure. Moreover, in many cases, you can use objective proxies, which are often pretty measurable, even if they're not precisely the same thing. 
So just to go back to my forced labor case, there are certifications and criteria to define what forced labor is. And some companies have gone through certification processes to certify, for instance, there's no forced labor among their own workforce. We're not talking about supply chain, we're talking about their own workforce. Will those certifications ensure that 100% of the workers on a given site, 100% of the time, will be entirely sure be free of forced labor? Perhaps not. Will they give a very good chance, beyond all reasonable doubt, that say 95% of workers on that site are working in conditions where they're free of forced labor? Probably yes. That might be enough in a certain sense to indicate information to consumers.
YOUTUBE EXTRACT ON SKEPTICISM ABOUT BALANCING PERFORMANCE WITH SUSTAINABILITY…
Marco DeBenedictis, Head of Sustainable Finance at Barclays Corporate Banking
Christian McCormick, Allianz Global Investors senior ESG strategist
Hal Lambert, founder and CEO of Point Bridge Capital,

Daniel Brown/reporter:
Brian, what do you see as the main risks, implementation challenges, or possible unintended consequences of smart product level disclosure? 
 Présentateur 2
So clearly a main challenge is winning over the minds of the right people to get it implemented. But I guess you want me to talk about more concrete challenges. So it's crucial, clarity is crucial in an information ecosystem. So it's crucial, this is 1, completely standardized, universal system. In many situations, we have seen companies trying to use, trying to kind of start an information free-for-all to instill confusion and hence distrust among the public or users. So first risk is to make sure that that's avoided. So inflammation intention should guard against that. And I think the nutritional table is really a good kind of, a good model for that. It's clear, it's well-defined, the information is verified. There's going to be two types of nutritional table, just one sustainability scorecard. 
A second kind of risk or thing to look out for is attempts to keep the costs down for companies. So there, I think the key is going to be to provide automatic ways for verification and calculation, where we don't give up the kind of objective, verified, truthful character of the indicators, but we do find ways in which things can be verified relatively easily for companies. We can perhaps talk about that in a second. Perhaps using indicators for which that's easier would help. 
Another challenge, risk, possibility, let's put it that way, is that people don't care, right? It could all be that we do all of this and people don't care, don't care enough to have any impact. To which my reaction would be, well, it's better to know that people don't care. Because if they don't care about sustainability, then any pro-sustainability policy will have to be imposed from above. But it will have to be done so without the buy-in of the population, which leaves us in a democratic conundrum. It'd be nice to know. 
And finally, in terms of consequences, I think the kind of the idea that the idea to install some sort of mass sustainability transparency, mass transparency about the sustainability dimensions of economies could open our eyes to some patterns which we don't know whether they're there or not. So it could well be that sustainable firms are being treated particularly unfairly by government policy. We don't know. I mean, by which I mean firms which are making sustainable product. It could well be that by the structure of the economy, we have a bunch of people who are living at a level where the only way they can survive is by buying into unsustainable products. I think the first, I mean, Having mass transparency is at least going to allow us to see the problem, which is clearly the first step to trying to resolve any problems on that.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
And then, Brian, there's the question of who implements and controls the scorecards. And to introduce that issue, let's have a final exchange with the students. I asked them who they would trust most to define and oversee the product scorecards. I mean, would it be the companies themselves, the regulators like the EU, or independent NGOs and experts? So it's back to the HEC library to hear their answers.
VOXPOP 03
Transcription
Student 1
I think, of course, there's a regulator, like the European Union is the most trustable option for me. If it came from the brand, I will be very less confident about it. And independent agencies, I think if it's a well-known name, it will be as “trustable” as a nation or European Union. But if it's a new name that I don't know, it will be more tricky.
Student 2
I think from practice most likely, probably, independence. There have been a lot of scandals with companies trying to do it themselves and then servicing. Probably governments and institutions themselves don't really have a lot of time, so probably independence.
Student 3
I think I will trust more institutions if it is the EU. I think there are the institutions that should regulate the market. So I think that's an institution I will prefer to make this kind of label. I think if companies do not take part in the process of making this label, we could assume that it is not greenwashing.
 Student 4
Independent NGOs, because like companies themselves, they will try to cheat a bit on the score so that they will benefit from what they wrote and the regulation system. I think they are not always fair and impartial as well. So I will definitely go for NGOs.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
So, a mixture of independent bodies and supranational bodies like the EU seem to be the favorites in this small vox pop of students that I met in the learning center here. Brian, your reaction to that?
HILL:
Yeah, so, but one thing is sure, Product level scorecards are not labels provided by a particular brand or specific to a particular brand. So there we kind of agree. On kind of validation and control, independence or supernational bodies is the type of direction that we propose in the policy paper. There are two separate dimensions. One is the kind of slightly more technical dimension of how this is going to be stored on whatever system, how it's going to be encrypted and so on and so forth. In principle, anybody can do that, but it seems like it's best that it's done properly in a way that no one can play with it, no one can change values when they shouldn't be. So you could leave this to a supernational body like the EU, in fact. It's developing something called the digital product passport, which is specifically on eco-design. It's going to have one or two environmental indicators like CO2 emissions, but a lot will be about recycling. The type of technical information, the type of kind of data and digitalization infrastructure, they are basically developing that. 
So that's one dimension about controlled validation, who's in charge, practical implementation, if you will. The other dimension is the entering and the validation of the information. So the indicators on the particular scorecards. And here the principle is very simple. Any information entered has to be validated. This is essential. I've talked about trust. I've talked about objectivity. I've talked about comparability. Companies aren't going to be allowed just to make up numbers and put them on. Everything has to be validated. The validation principles clearly are going to have to be defined by public bodies. It could be United Nations it could be the European Union, it could be an international body. I mentioned the International Labour Organization as concerns human rights, so on and so forth. And then you're going to need a control system which will at least be underpinned by a public body. So you can imagine that it's guaranteed by the European Union or some other national or supranational body, that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be third parties that are involved. So you can imagine accreditation agencies for some indicators, so we talked about forced labor. And it doesn't mean just because there's a public body involved, it doesn't mean that it can't be automatic. Because one of the things you can do is you can cross-check the information. Part of your validation procedure could be cross-checking the information with other mandated information. For instance, wage inequality for a single firm level, as soon as a company sends in its tax returns for all of its employees, that can be crossed checked. You can even imagine that the wage inequality pops up automatically, right, if you have an appropriate system. Similarly for CO2, you can have controls where the company tells you which products they've bought. Government can control the CO2 on those products. There's information about the company's production process, which could be only checked once every few years. That's a validation process immediately there, right? You don't need a third accreditation agency coming in and doing that. In fact, and that's very related, some of my colleagues who have contributed to the report, in the (HEC) accounting department, have pointed out to existing auditing processes and practices already there for validating other things, financial data.
I should also add that this sort of validation is a sort of thing where if you use state-of-the-art encryption techniques of the sort which have been suggested, for instance, by the World Bank, the certified indicator going to be communicated without the data underlying it being communicated. So business secrecy is also going to be protected in this sort of system.
JINGLE
Daniel Brown/reporter:
If our listeners, Brian, looked a bit into your background, they'd find perhaps a more unusual trajectory than a lot of the academics here at HEC Paris, because you have this doctorate in philosophy. And I'm just wondering how and where you would say this discipline infuses your approach, if it does, but I think it does.
HILL:
Well, disciplines are vast. And what I took from philosophy is clearly going to be dependent on some of the idiosyncratic factors of what I was doing and the type of philosophy I was involved with. But if I had to summarize it, I would say it gives me three things which then have kind of consequences down the line. So I do a type of philosophy where rigor had a very important role. abstraction, clearly is something you get from a philosopher, and a sense for the essential. And I think that's useful in three ways with respect to this project and more generally in my research. It's useful because it gives you the tools you require to do critical thinking. In particular, a keen sense for smelling out in any given argument or consideration or structure or setup, both the solid points and the weak points. Secondly, the kind of more abstraction side allows you to see the big picture and gives you again a sense for the important, the deep elements that are underlying that picture rather than separating them out from the superficial ones. 
And finally, I would say that it's given me real out-of-the-box thinking. So if you set as your task solving a problem, typically, the definition and the set of that problem, as well as some perhaps implicit expectations you might have about what sort of thing accounts as a solution to that problem, that's basically a web of assumptions that can put blinkers on and blind you to perhaps elegant, effective, really useful solutions. What philosophy tells you, kind of teaches us, is that some of the greatest human advances some of the greatest advances in human thought come from identifying and overcoming these sorts of assumptions. And it gives you a keen nose for seeing them, for trying to trace them out, and an awareness of the importance of tracking them down, which has proved very useful to me, should be something that more people use, I think.
Daniel Brown/reporter:
Professor Brian Hill Thank you, very much…
Thank you Daniel
Signature Tune
MIKE OUTRO
Brian Hill, closing out this December edition of Breakthroughs. And you can read details of his policy paper, “Squaring Disclosure Regulation and Competitiveness” by clicking on the link we’ve put up. Could it be part of the answer to growing calls for companies to report more on their environmental, social, and governance activities across the 12 disclosure categories they’ve set up? The challenges are there, as Europe downsizes and delays its implementation of the CSRD and its companion law. Researchers at HEC will be keeping a close eye on developments in that field…
Well, that rounds up our year focusing on HEC’s pool of research both from its academics and the doctoral students that are breaking new ground. Until next year, it’s goodbye from the Knowledge@HEC team, and the Breakthroughs podcast.
Squaring Disclosure Regulation and Competitiveness HEC Paris Policy Paper 1 October 2025 can be found here: 
You can read an executive summary here: