Egregiousness and Boycott Intensity: Evidence from the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Zhongmin Wang (), Alvin Lee () and Michael Polonsky ()
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Zhongmin Wang: Resources for the Future, Washington, DC 20036
Alvin Lee: Department of Marketing, Deakin University, Victoria 3125, Australia
Michael Polonsky: Department of Marketing, Deakin University, Victoria 3125, Australia

Management Science, 2018, vol. 64, issue 1, 149-163

Abstract: 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 .

Keywords: egregiousness; boycott; BP oil spill; environmentalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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