The Formation Mechanism Of Certification Market Segmentation

Certification refers to an activity to certify the product,service and management systemin accordance with the relevant technical specification,which is related to mandatory requirements or standards conformity assessment.With depth development of the international economic integration and the Reform and Opening,more and more firms realized that both in the country and abroad,certification plays an important role in the market expansion,and it is an important strategy for firms which survived from the competition and obtain the favor of consumers that getting access to the certification of qualify.The urgent needs of firms for certification provides a huge business development opportunities for certification bodies.However,with the rapid development of certification,the increasing number of certification bodies leads to a state of market segmentation.High-quality firms choose the certification body with high reputation,and low-quality firms choose the certification body with low reputation.Different types of firms and certification bodies are restricted in two closed sub-market,and the firms' quality that choose the certification with high reputation meets the certification standards,while the firms' quality that choose the certification with low reputation less than the standards,so that the average quality of the certified products in the segmented market is declining,which is not only detrimental to the interests of consumers,but also is harm to the improvement of market efficiency.For this phenomenon,we build the selection model with the firms to verify the existence of the market segmentation.First of all,this paper describes the characteristics of the supply and the demand side of the certification market,and there is a certain understanding of the reasons for the formation of the certification,the feature of the certification market and the firm's selection mechanism for the certification bodies.On this basis,we build a firm's selection model to verify the segmentation of the certification market,and put forward the theoretical hypothesis.Furthermore,in view of the particularity of the productive service industry,this paper takes the ISO9001 certification of productive service firms as an example,and carries on the empirical test to the theoretical hypothesis put forward in the model before.The empirical results show that high-quality productive service firms will choose high-reputation certification bodies,and low-quality productive service firms will choose low-reputationcertification bodies.Moreover,if the degree of marketization of the area in which productive service firm is located is high,the tendency of high-quality productive service firms choose high-reputation certification bodies will be weaken.Finally,combining the analysis results of theoretical model and empirical test,we put forward a series of corresponding policy recommendations to improve the segmentation of certification market.