Selfish Corporations / Emanuele Colonnelli, Niels Joachim Gormsen, Timothy McQuade.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Colonnelli, Emanuele.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gormsen, Niels Joachim.

McQuade, Timothy.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30576.

NBER working paper series no. w30576

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

We study how perceptions of corporate responsibility influence policy preferences and the effectiveness of corporate communication when agents have imperfect memory recall. Using a new large-scale survey of U.S. citizens on their support for corporate bailouts, we first establish that the public demands corporations to behave better within society, a sentiment we label "big business discontent." Using random variation in the order of survey sections and in the exposure to animated videos, we then show that priming respondents to think about corporate responsibility lowers the support for bailouts. This finding suggests that big business discontent influences policy preferences. Furthermore, we find that messages which paint a positive picture of corporate responsibility can "backfire," as doing so brings attention to an aspect on which the public has negative views. In contrast, reframing corporate bailouts in terms of economic trade-offs increases support for the policy. We develop a memory-based model of decision-making and communication to rationalize these findings.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2022.