International Corporate Responsibility Series

Volume 3, 2007

Controversies in International Corporate Responsibility

Pat Auger, Timothy Devinney, Jordan Louviere
Pages 207-221

Measuring the Importance of Ethical Consumerism
A Multi-Country Empirical Investigation

This paper describes the results of several large empirical studies that investigated the impact of social product attributes on consumer purchase intentions. Our results show that some consumers are willing to pay for more socially acceptable products, but that most of those consumers do not think about the social product features of the products they purchase. Furthermore, our analyses demonstrate that consumers can be segmented based on their preferences for (or against) social product features and that these segments are not country-specific.