Socially Responsible Newsvendor
研究了四种企业社会责任行为（混合目标、纳什谈判、捐赠、公平模型）对利润和消费者剩余的影响，发现低消费者剩余考虑时，以小幅利润下降换取消费者剩余大幅提升；捐赠并非总是最优，挑战了弗里德曼的利润优先再分配观点。
ABSTRACT With the advocacy on corporate social responsibility (CSR), it is common for firms to integrate profit objectives with social responsibilities, such as with an aim to boost consumer welfare. We focus on a socially responsible firm that is concerned with its profit as well as consumer surplus and examine four different types of pro‐social behavior by the firm: optimizing a weighted average of the expected profit and consumer surplus (referred to as the mixed‐objective model), negotiating with pro‐social executives (referred to as the Nash bargaining), charitable donations after profit maximization (referred to as the donation), and ensuring the portion of consumer surplus to be a given fraction of the social welfare (referred to as the fairness model). Our results show that under all behaviors, there is a more substantial boost to consumer surplus at the expense of a slight decrease in profit when consumer surplus consideration (referred to as the CSC level) is lower. Among those four behaviors, while maintaining the same profit level, a donation is not the most consumer‐surplus‐enhancing pro‐social behavior among those four behaviors, when the overhead cost is sufficiently high or when a high enough profit level needs to be maintained. This finding challenges Milton Friedman's advocacy that socially responsible businesses should indirectly fulfill their societal duties by first focusing on profit maximization and then redistributing the generated profit for social causes. Our results imply and quantify the managerial insight that in balancing consumer surplus against profit loss, a little commitment to consumers can go a long way. We also shed light on when the firm should choose a decentralized pro‐social behavior, such as donations, and when it should incorporate consumer surplus consideration into operational decisions for consumer surplus enhancement.