Title
Corporate Social Responsibility (Csr) Issues In Supply Chain Competition: Should Greenwashing Be Regulated?
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been treated as an instrument to differentiate firms in a competitive market. However, due to the credence good nature of CSR, when considering product quality dimension, firms can only signal their quality through advertising or labeling. These signaling mechanisms may be exploited by some dishonest firms who claim to be green ("greenwashing"). Many critics argue that greenwashing needs to be regulated because it deceives the market and discourages firms from going genuinely green. In this article, instead of focusing on the ethical side of this issue, we try to explore the market outcome from an economic perspective. We show that regulating greenwashing may not necessarily increase the positive environmental externality of green products. In particular, even if greenwashing is regulated, firms may not act green when the additional CSR cost is too high or when the corresponding CSR issue is not as important. On the other hand, we find that allowing greenwashing may incentivize some firms to go genuinely green as long as there are some informed customers in the market.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1111/deci.12307
DECISION SCIENCES
Keywords
Field
DocType
Corporate Social Responsibility, Greenwashing, Green Marketing, Regulation, Supply Chain Management
Corporate social responsibility,Green marketing,Economics,Supply chain management,Supply chain,Greenwashing,Industrial organization,Management science
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
49
6
0011-7315
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.37
6
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ho Cheung Brian Lee141.09
Jose Cruz230.76
Ramesh Shankar341.07