Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 9th May 2025, 10:20:55am EDT

 
 
Session Overview
Session
Track T7-2: Stakeholders, Politics, and Firm Behavior
Time:
Tuesday, 20/May/2025:
9:30am - 10:15am

Session Chair: Paola Sapienza, Stanford University
Discussant: Timothy McQuade, Haas School of Business
Location: Gateway South 122


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Presentations

Consuming Values

Jacob Conway1, Levi Boxell2

1University of Chicago; 2Unaffiliated

We study the extent to which individuals’ consumption decisions are influenced by firms' stances on controversial social issues and the implied incentives for firms to take such stances. We use transactions from a major payment card company to predict cardholders' likely social alignment with firm stances and to quantify effects on consumption. The social stances taken by firms increase revenue on average, with significant heterogeneity across consumers and firm stances. Consumers most aligned with a firm’s social stance increase their consumption at the firm by 19 percent in the month following widely known social stance events, and consumers most opposed to the firm's stance decrease their consumption by 11 percent. These diverging consumption responses attenuate over time but persist even a year later. Firms tend to take stances that align with their consumers' and employees' social preferences and that correlate with the firm’s ownership structure. Together our results show that consumers meaningfully respond to their social alignment with firms, and that this consumer response can incentivize profit-maximizing firms to engage with social issues.

Conway-Consuming Values-628.pdf


 
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