Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Good Deeds, Business, Social and Environmental Responsibility in a Market Experiment

Mario Biggeri, Domenico Colucci, Nicola Doni and Vincenzo Valori
Additional contact information
Domenico Colucci: DISEI, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Via delle Pandette 32, 50127 Florence, Italy
Nicola Doni: DISEI, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Via delle Pandette 32, 50127 Florence, Italy

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 6, 1-20

Abstract: We study how commitment of entrepreneurs to sustainability practices might effectively improve the social and environmental impact of market competition. To this end we devised a market experiment in which profit maximization and socially and environmentally concerned behavior were both potential goals of producers. Our subject pool included two distinct types of students having different prosocial attitudes. The two types adopted significantly different strategies in the treatment group, where producers could contribute to a positive externality, whereas they behaved similarly in the control group, where the only objective was profit maximization. Subjects who were ex-ante more prosocial chose to produce with more focus on the positive externality than their counterparts. However, they failed to actually deliver a larger social impact as a consequence of the market outcome. We conclude that producers often commit to social responsibility, even though well-meaning conducts do not necessarily beget equally good outcomes.

Keywords: sustainable entrepreneurship; social responsibility; environmental responsibility; market experiment; charitable giving; vertical differentiation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/6/3577/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/6/3577/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:6:p:3577-:d:774118

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().