The risk of standards proliferation – An analysis of differences between private and public transport standards

•Enterprises need to deal with several national and international frameworks. Managers are challenged to choose and implement among these.•The research sheds light on the differences between public and private standards, emphasizing the problem of (1) differentiating and choosing among them, and (2) harmonizing.•An important factor we consider to diversify the standards, is their institutional form: private, hence developed by companies and disseminated through available international organizations (e.g. ISO or TAPA) and public, i.e. regulatory frameworks (e.g. AEO).•Two standards, AEO and TAPA, are compared in terms of impacts on security and operational performance.