Objective Sustainability Assessment in the Digital Economy: An Information Entropy Measure of Transparency in Corporate Sustainability Reporting

The Internet is now a central enabler for sharing sustainability information. Yet, such enablement complicated through an exponentially increasing array of What lacking in the digital economy are objective and transparent mechanisms to provide reliable assessments published information timely efficient manner. In addressing limitation, this research proposes automated mechanism measuring transparency reporting using entropy-based approach. Through text-mining methods expert validation, study built dictionary corpus then applied objectively assessing relative entropy between probability distributions words those corporate reports. To demonstrate its effectiveness, was empirically compare organizations energy sector. Here, effectively compared cartels with non-cartels by reports major OPEC (Organization Petroleum Exporting Countries) non-OPEC producers spanning three-year period found consistent differences two groups. findings likely normative pressures on disaffiliated which may be immune. holds important theoretical practical contributions field as it provides rapid means textual analysis information, thus promoting rapidly evolving economy.