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.