Do Consumers Care About a Retailers’ Corporate Social Responsibility? – An Investigation of the Impact of CSR Activities on Consumer Behavior

Abstract

Even though it is by no means a new idea, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is of high topicality both in business practice across all in-dustries and in the academic literature. An impressive body of research has addressed the impact of CSR activities on corporate perform-ance, for example, with a focus on the company market value or financial performance (see Orlitzky, Schmidt, and Rynes 2003 and Wu 2006 for meta-analyzes). Anyhow, despite the number of studies on this particular relationship, there still is a limited understanding of whether and how CSR actions have a positive impact on firm performance (Luo and Bhattacharya 2006). Only few studies have analyzed the role of CSR in retailing in a comprehensive manner. With our study, we address the question whether and how CSR activities of retailers contribute to retailers performance.