Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

We study the strategy for the development of standard means of communicating information between businesses and governments. At this time, almost all of the funding and activity to develop and enhance a tool for such communication, which is named eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is being done by and in the United States. We use China, who competes with the U.S. in the XBRL market, as an example to investigate if sharing the developmental effort by one, or more, additional countries would produce a more optimum result. Based on game theory, we demonstrate that China should increase investment in XBRL. The best achievable performance is when China and the U.S. almost split equally the whole XBRL market, leaving only a small portion to the “Followers”. (Followers are users that utilize XBRL, but have little or no participation in its development.) The paper provides a brief overview of the history and the reality of XBRL. The authors attempt to estimate (1) the benefits for China in the development of XBRL (2) benefits under monopoly (3) benefits under oligopoly and (4) benefits under the extreme condition with two participants equally sharing the market.