Does Product Market Competition Promote or Reduce Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility Behavior? How Stakeholder Attention Shapes Responsiveness to Stakeholders
研究产品市场竞争如何影响企业社会责任行为，发现利益相关者关注（不同类型和群体内）会调节这一关系，基于2008-2017年中国上市私营企业数据。
Abstract Does product market competition (PMC) promote or reduce firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) behavior? While some studies suggest that CSR is a differentiation strategy that leads to a positive relationship between PMC and CSR, others consider CSR a discretionary cost that firms in competitive markets should avoid. Drawing on instrumental stakeholder theory and research on organizational attention, we aim to clarify the extent to which CSR provides a competitive advantage for firms by exploring how different types of stakeholder attention—both between different stakeholder groups and within a specific stakeholder group—affect the PMC–CSR relationship. We test our framework using data on Chinese private (i.e., non-state-owned) companies on major Chinese stock exchanges from 2008 to 2017. Overall, our analyses highlight that stakeholder attention affects how firms assess the tension between the benefits and costs of CSR and that the contingent effect of different stakeholder attention varies within and between stakeholder groups.