The Taste for Corporate Responsibility: Heterogeneity and Consensus Around CR Indicators

We investigated, using an ad hoc questionnaire, a sample of Italian respondents’ opinions on different corporate responsibility (CR) items typically used by CR rating agencies. The hypotheses that equal average value weights are given to different CR items and equal variance (which we consider a proxy for the inverse of consensus on the importance of an indicator) were strongly rejected by our data, both in our overall survey sample and in more homogeneous subsamples based on gender, age, education, and religious beliefs. More specifically, we found that top environmental (renewable energy) and labor (heath and safety on the job) items had significantly higher scores than customer satisfaction, corporate governance, and animal testing items. We as well often reject the hypothesis that value weights for the same CR item are the same across different subpopulations in gender subsamples, because women attributed significantly higher weights than men to many CR items when we not corrected for young respondents’ oversampling.     

Differences in Perception of Risk Between People Who Have and Have Not Experienced Salmonella Food Poisoning

It is believed that food hygiene precautions in domestic kitchens are an important strategy in efforts to reduce the incidence of sporadic food poisoning, but recent research has shown that people who have suffered food poisoning handle the same types of foods and adopt similar food hygiene precautions in their kitchens to the rest of the population. This suggests the need to examine other factors. A case-control study of sporadic Salmonella food poisoning was conducted to investigate several domestic kitchen risk factors. Measures of perception of risk, knowledge, and control associated with food poisoning in case and control respondents are reported here. It was found that perceived personal risk from food poisoning in the home was less than perceived risk to other people. In contrast, ratings of personal knowledge about food poisoning and personal control over food poisoning in the home were seen to be greater than other people's knowledge and control. There were no differences between the cases and the controls in their ratings of knowledge about food poisoning or their control over food poisoning. However, cases perceived their personal risk from food poisoning to be higher than controls. Both case and control samples exhibited optimistic bias but this was reduced in the case sample, suggesting that experience with food poisoning may reduce optimistic bias.