| Popis: |
Consumers today want to know more about where and how the products they purchase are being made. To create transparency requires a company to both gain visibility into its supply chain and disclose information to consumers. In this paper, we focus on the dimension of visibility and investigate when companies can benefit from greater supply chain visibility. To do so, we design an incentivized human-subject experiment to study two key questions: (i) When does supply chain visibility impact consumers' valuations of a company's social responsibility practices in its upstream supply chain? (ii) What roles do consumers' reciprocal motives and prosocial orientations play in affecting their valuations under different levels of visibility? In our design, greater visibility is represented by lower uncertainty in the outcomes of a company's social responsibility efforts. Our results show that consumers value greater visibility either when workers in the upstream supply chain are disadvantaged or when consumers use uncertainty as an excuse not to pay for social responsibility (i.e., they exhibit a self-serving bias). In addition, we observe that high prosocial consumers do not exhibit strong reciprocal motives. Conversely, reciprocal motives significantly increase low prosocial consumers' valuations under high visibility. Our work adds to the experimental literature on transparency in social responsibility (which has primarily studied disclosure) by examining the equally important but understudied dimension of visibility. We identify conditions under which there is a revenue benefit to greater visibility. Our results on consumer heterogeneity offer insights into what social responsibility information resonates with a company's target consumers. |
