The Greenwashing Machine : is CSR more than Communication

Rémi Bazillier (1) , Julien Vauday (2, 3)

1 LEO - Laboratoire d'économie d'Orleans [2008-2011]
2 X-DEP-ECO - Département d'Économie de l'École Polytechnique
3 CEPN - Centre d'Economie de l'Université Paris Nord (ancienne affiliation)

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and advertising are strategic complements. Short of assuming firms are pure benevolent, firms will consider CSR as beneficial if it contributes to their sales and/or profits. However, it could be that communicating on CSR represents by itself a good strategy. If the claim about the environmental or social benefits of the product is unsubstantiated or misleading, this practice is known under the name of GreenWashing (GW). If consumers do not discover there is no CSR, they may be attracted by a so-called CSR product because of the advertising. This paper provides both a theoretical and an empirical frameworks to explore this question. The model clearly identifies some “usual suspects” that will prefer GW over CSR. We then conduct an empirical analysis using data on CSR, economic data of the 500 largest European firms to test the predictions. Several instruments are used in order to estimate the propensity to prefer GW, such as the number of pages of sustainable development reports. The results confirm that there exist some “usual suspects”.

Mots clés: Corporate Social Responsibility; Greenwashing; Communication

Domaines: Economies et finances

Rémi Bazillier, Julien Vauday. The Greenwashing Machine : is CSR more than Communication. 2009. ⟨hal-00448861v1⟩