Is Social Responsibility a Normal Good?

Björn Bartling, Vanessa Valero and Roberto A. Weber

No 7263, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We investigate whether growth in consumer income causes an increased willingness to pay to mitigate negative externalities from consumption. Correlational field evidence suggests a positive relationship between income and social responsibility. To investigate a causal link, we conduct a laboratory market experiment in which firms and consumers can exchange products that differ in the degree to which they mitigate negative external impacts at the expense of higher production costs. Our treatments exogenously vary consumers’ incomes. Our experimental results reveal that growth in consumer income causes an increase in the share of socially responsible consumption in the laboratory. Such a causal relationship is significant from a policy perspective, as it implies that some negative external impacts of consumption activity can be mitigated as societies experience economic growth.

Keywords: social responsibility; income growth; normal goods; laboratory experiment; market game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D31 D62 M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7263.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ces:ceswps:_7263

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().