Symbolic or Substantive: An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility Strategies
通过博弈模型分析企业选择象征性还是实质性CSR的动机，发现竞争会抑制实质性CSR但提升社会福利，且价格溢价和消费者抵制在竞争下不一定促进实质性CSR。
As corporate social responsibility (CSR) gains prominence, firms confront a strategic choice between symbolic CSR, which offers superficial signals and entails greenwashing risk, and substantive CSR, which eliminates this risk through genuine and impactful practices at a higher cost. Prior research primarily examined whether firms engage in CSR, with limited exploration on the choice between symbolic and substantive CSR once engagement is decided. This paper develops a game-theoretic model to examine firms' incentives for substantive CSR, and how these varies with market structures and relevant exogenous parameters, including price premium, greenwashing risk, and consumer boycotts. We find that firms implement substantive CSR only when the incremental marginal cost is sufficiently low, and this condition becomes more stringent under competition. Although competition discourages the adoption of substantive CSR, it increases consumer surplus and social welfare when substantive CSR is implemented. Counterintuitively, our paper demonstrates that price premium and consumer boycotts do not always promote substantive CSR under competition due to strategic price interactions. Furthermore, we derive the equilibrium CSR strategy structure and identify a dynamic set of the equilibrium structures that always includes the symmetric structures. Interestingly, a prisoner's dilemma, in which both firms implement Pareto-insufficient symbolic CSR, may arise when the set consists solely of the symmetric structures. Finally, we show that these results remain robust under model extensions and demonstrate that the presence of consumers who refuse to pay a price premium may surprisingly increase firms' prices and profits.