American International Journal of Social Science

Assessing the Value Consumers Ascribe to Corporate Social Involvement in Product Choice
Dr. André Carlos Martins Menck

Abstract
This paper deals with the demand side when regarding corporate social involvement. It seeks to determine the value consumers ascribe to socially concerned products and firms. Several studies have been done in this venue. However, most of them are attitudinal studies and assess only consumer intention, not choice. This research faces the quest by using choice conjoint tasks, thus avoiding attitudinal measures. It analyses the value consumers ascribe to corporate social involvement through the parameters cross-elasticity. The analysis assumes a twophased consumer decision process—alternative consideration followed by choice conditioned to the inclusion of the alternative in the consideration set. Results reveal large cross-elasticity between the level of social involvement and the functional attributes, in both consideration and choice phases. This is observed consistently across four product and service categories. The magnitude of the effect of being socially responsible is similar to excel in important functional attributes.

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