Corporate social responsibility and profit maximising behaviour under consumer tastes uncertainty

We extend the traditional horizontal differentiation models to the analysis of firm location into the space of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in presence of consumers with heterogeneous tastes and willingness to pay for it. We find that nonzero corporate social responsibility, even when modelled as a pure cost, may be an optimal choice for profit maximising producers is conditional to CSR costs, consumers’ sensitiveness for CSR and uncertainty about consumer tastes.