Standard
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- For other uses, see Standard (disambiguation).
Standards make an enormous and positive contribution to most aspects of our lives, ensuring desirable characteristics of products and services such as quality, environmental friendliness, safety, reliability, efficiency and interchangeability — and at an economical cost. In a common use of the term, standard is a set of reference objects, a set of rules, or a specification with rules and references. Examples: SI-standards, ISO-standards, W3C standards.
In social sciences, including economics, the idea of standard is close to the solution for a coordination problem, a situation in which all parties can realize mutual gains, but only by making mutually consistent decisions. Standard is the "agreement choice" in this decision.
A standard is a agreement about a level of quality or attainment, or about something used as a measure for comparative evaluations, or a rule or set of rules or requirements which are widely agreed upon or imposed by government.
Standard is a result from a Standardization process, produced into a Standards organization or by the tradition into a cultural community.
General types of standards:
- Voluntary: users have a free choice, for use or not;
- Mandatory: if the standard body can obligate (explicit penalties) the adoption of the standard, like standards fixed by Law and government obligation norms.
