EXPRESS: Examining Consumer Responses to Supply Chain CSR Communications: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

Apparel retailers face increasing pressure to communicate the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of their supply chains. While communicating positive CSR performance is common, communicating less-than-perfect performance is challenging and has only recently gained attention. To inform retailers' communication strategies, we examine consumers' responses to different levels of supply chain CSR performance and the mechanisms underlying these responses. We propose a mediation framework in which CSR performance influences purchase intentions through two interrelated evaluations: perceived price fairness and perceived product desirability. We further test how these evaluations are moderated by two aspects of price context: consumers' historical price paid and the retail price presented at purchase. We conduct two controlled experiments in an online shopping context. A non-incentivized study examines the proposed mediation mechanisms and develops additional hypotheses about price context, which we test in an incentivized study. Across both studies, we find that communicating less-than-perfect CSR performance does not uniformly elicit negative consumer responses. Mediation analyses identify the indirect effects of CSR performance on purchase intentions, with price fairness emerging as a particularly robust mediator. Moreover, the strength of these effects depends on price context. Historical price paid shapes how consumers interpret CSR information when forming price fairness perceptions: consumers who typically pay a lower (higher) price respond more strongly to positive (negative) CSR performance. A low retail price then conditions these responses by amplifying the influence of price fairness on product desirability. We show that consumer responses to CSR performance communication are not uniform; instead, they depend on consumers' price fairness and product desirability evaluations, and how these evaluations are shaped by the price context.

• 저널Production and Operations Management
• 토픽Sustainable Supply Chain Management · Strategy and Management
• DOI10.1177/10591478261458080
• 저자Junhao Vincent Yu, Tim Kraft, Robert Handfield, Rejaul Hasan, Marguerite Moore