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Should charity begin at home? An empirical investigation of consumers’ responses to companies’ varying geographic allocations of donation budgets

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-01-27, 09:57 authored by Laura M Schons, John Cadogan, Roumpini Tsakona
In our globalized and interconnected world, companies are increasingly donating substantial amounts to good causes around the globe. Many companies choose to donate “at home” while others give to causes in faraway places where recipients are in dire need of support. Interestingly, past research on corporate donations has neglected the question of whether consumers differentially reward companies for geographically varying allocations of donation budgets. Through a mixed methods approach, this paper remedies this gap by developing and empirically testing a conceptual framework of consumers’ preferences for geographically varying allocations of corporate donation budgets. In a first step, two preliminary field studies (N 1 = 76; N 2 = 80) involving real donations explored customers’ preferences for donation allocations varying in geographical focus. A qualitative focus group study then investigated underlying rationales to inform the research and led to the development of hypotheses. Subsequently a large-scale between-subjects scenario experiment (N = 5770) tested the predictions. Overall, results indicate that, in contrast with current managerial practice, customers prefer companies that split donations equally between domestic and foreign recipients or even donate only abroad.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Journal of Business Ethics

Volume

144

Pages

559 - 576

Citation

SCHONS, L.M., CADOGAN, J.W. and TSAKONA, R., 2015. Should charity begin at home? An empirical investigation of consumers’ responses to companies’ varying geographic allocations of donation budgets. Journal of Business Ethics, 144 (3), pp. 559–576.

Publisher

© Springer Science+Business Media

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2015-08-19

Publication date

2015-08-29

Notes

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2832-9

ISSN

0167-4544

eISSN

1573-0697

Language

  • en