Consumer Perception of Corporate Value Endorsement

Do consumers naively reward corporate value endorsement? In an online market experiment, U.S. consumers buy from sellers who endorse values with varying strategic incentives and costs. Consumers reward value-endorsing sellers but discount endorsements chosen under strategic incentives; surprisingly, costly endorsements do not outperform cheap ones. Consumers' beliefs appear sophisticated: they anticipate pandering, understand selection, but also expect a larger strategic response when endorsement is costly. A rational-inference benchmark based on consumers' own beliefs closely approximates observed willingness-to-pay for strategic sellers, consistent with consumers valuing the possibility of genuine alignment even in strategic environment. Open-ended narratives reveal the same mixed-population reasoning outside the experiment: consumers attribute value endorsements to both profit and genuine motives. These findings help explain why cheap value appeals can persist and why costly commitment may fail to help genuinely aligned firms stand out.