Distribution of responsibility, ability and competition

Johan Graafland

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper considers the distribution of responsibility for prevention of negative social or ecological effects of production and consumption. Responsibility is related to ability and ability depends on welfare. An increase in competition between Western companies depresses their profitability, but increases the welfare of Western consumers, and hence their ability, to acknowledge social values. Therefore, an increase in competition on consumer markets shifts the balance in responsibility from companies to consumers to prevent negative external effects from production and consumption patterns. An increase in competition on investor markets will shift the balance in an opposite direction.

Keywords: Corporate social responsibility; ability; fairness; distribution; externalities; competition; ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D49 D63 L19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published in Journal of Business Ethics 45.1-2(2003): pp. 133-147

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20731/1/MPRA_paper_20731.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:20731

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().