• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.41-65
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• 2018

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities are important tool in corporate management strategies. However, the way that companies conduct CSR activities might bring different effect on consumers. The purpose of this study is to verify the effect of CSR fit (similarity between the firm's CSR activities and the firm's core products or technologies) on the consumers' evaluation on product performance. In addition to the main effects of CSR fit on perceived product performance, and we also examined how this effect changes when CSR information source and consumer expertise are involved as control variables. Study 1 of this research was conducted with US consumers and study 2 was with Chinese consumers. Experimental results show that consumers' perceive product performance is better when the fit between CSR activities and firm's core products or technologies is low than the fit is high. When CSR information sources are neutral sources, consumers perceive product performance to be better when the fit between the firm's CSR activities and the firm's core products or technologies is low than the fit is high. However when CSR information was delivered by company's source like nadvertisement, such difference disappears. This study also show that the higher the customer's expertise, the better the product performance was perceived for high-fit CSR activities. On the other hand, the lower the consumer's expertise, the better perceived product performance was perceived for low-fit CSR activities.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.13-31
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• 2016

Despite expectations of short- or long-term positive effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on firm performance, the results of existing research into this relationship are inconsistent partly due to lack of clarity about subordinate CSR concepts. In this study, keywords related to CSR concepts are extracted from atypical sources, such as newspapers, using text mining techniques to examine the relationship between CSR and firm performance. The analysis is based on data from the New York Times, a major news publication, and Google Scholar. We used text analytics to process unstructured data collected from open online documents to explore the effects of CSR on short- and long-term firm performance. The results suggest that the CSR index computed using the proposed text - online media - analytics predicts long-term performance very well compared to short-term performance in the absence of any internal firm reports or CSR institute reports. Our study demonstrates the text analytics are useful for evaluating CSR performance with respect to convenience and cost effectiveness.