Use of a refined corporate social responsibility model to mitigate information asymmetry and evaluate performance

Abstract

While the importance of Corporate Sociable Responsibility (CSR) has been widely acknowledged, research on how to guide a company in evaluating and improving its CSR performance is relatively under-explored. This paper adopts the predominant framework from the United Nations (UN) and proposes a refined CSR model by using a hybrid multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. The proposed approach is expected to mitigate the potential information asymmetry issue that might deteriorate the CSR performance of a company. To illustrate the hybrid approach, this study analyzes the CSR performance of four publicly listed information technology (IT) manufacturing companies with the participation of senior domain experts, by using the proposed approach. The CSR performance ranking results are consistent by using various experiments, which is similar to the annual CSR contest held by a prominent organization from Taiwan in 2019. In addition, we illustrate how to apply this refined model to gain managerial insights and pursue sustainable CSR improvement with a priority.