Egregiousness and Boycott Intensity: Evidence from the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
研究了消费者抵制强度如何受事件恶劣程度和消费者对恶劣的厌恶程度影响，以BP漏油事件为例，发现漏油量、持续时间、媒体报道及地区环保倾向和地理距离均影响抵制强度。
Consumer boycotts are triggered by egregious events, but the literature has not distinguished the level of egregiousness from consumers’ preferences or disutility associated with a given level of egregiousness, nor has the literature studied how these two components of egregiousness affect boycott intensity. We provide a model of market-level boycotts that distinguishes the two egregiousness components. Consistent with the predictions of our model, the market-level intensity of consumer boycotting of BP-branded gasoline, which was triggered by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, increased with the spill’s egregiousness level, approximated by the officially reported daily amount of oil leaked into the ocean and by other measures (i.e., the duration of the spill and the intensity of media coverage), and with consumers’ disutility from egregiousness, approximated by an area’s environmentalism and its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.