The economic impacts of social activism and corporate social responsibility on food fraud

The study examines the relationship between the corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments of a food firm, an activist’s incentive to target the firm to uncover and deter fraudulent behavior, and the firm’s incentive to commit food fraud. Specifically, we develop a game theoretic model to analyze the strategic interaction between a food firm that decides whether to provide a credence food attribute and whether to misrepresent the quality of its product, and an activist who decides whether to monitor the firm and launch a campaign to uncover and remove false/misleading quality claims. We further examine the effect of CSR and the activist’s presence on the level of quality the firm provides. We derive the conditions under which an activist will find it optimal to monitor the firm to uncover fraudulent quality claims and the firm will find it optimal to misrepresent its product quality. Analytical results show that the greater the firm’s CSR investments, the less likely it is that the activist will find it optimal to monitor the firm, and the more likely it is that the firm will find it optimal to misrepresent its product quality. Results also show that the firm is more likely to misrepresent its product quality when its effectiveness in contesting the activist’s campaign is relatively high, and more likely to actually provide a high-quality product when the cost of the credence attribute is relatively low.