Business Commons^™

How Much Do Investors Care About Social Responsibility?, Scott Hirst, Kobi Kastiel, Tamar Kricheli-Katz

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps the most important corporate law debate over the last several years concerns whether directors and executives should manage the corporation to maximize value for investors or also take into account the interests of other stakeholders and society. But, do investors themselves wish to maximize returns, or are they willing to forgo returns for social purposes? And more broadly, do market participants, such as investors and consumers, differ from donors in the ways in which they prioritize monetary gains and the promotion of social goals?

This project attempts to answer these questions with evidence from an experiment conducted with 279 …