Corporate Reputation and Social Activism

Jose Miguel Abito is Assistant Professor of Business Economics & Public Policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.David Besanko is IBM Professor of Regulation & Competitive Practices at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in the Econometrica, American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, RAND Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Law and Economics.Daniel Diermeier serves as the thirteenth Provost of the University of Chicago, where he is the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School Public Policy and the College. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (CIFAR).

• 1 An Introduction to Corporate Campaigns 1.1 Corporate campaigns1.2 Firm strategies1.3 The consequences of corporate campaigns1.4 Private politics and corporate social responsibility1.5 Overview 2 A Dynamic Model of Corporate Campaigns 2.1 The model2.2 Equilibrium analysis 2.3 Empirical implications2.4 Conclusions2.5 Appendix to Chapter 2 3 Campaign Tactics 3.1 The model 3.2 Equilibrium analysis: preliminaries3.3 Computational approach 3.4 Equilibrium analysis: characterization of equilibrium3.5 Rewards as a campaign tactic 3.6 Empirical Implications3.7 Conclusions3.8 Appendix to Chapter 3 4 Do Activist Campaigns Bene.t Society? 4.1 The welfare economics of campaigns4.2 Applications of model insights4.3 Is passion socially valuable?4.4 Conclusions4.5 Appendix to Chapter 4 5 Target Selection by Activists and the Structure of Competition5.1 Model set-up and preliminary analysis5.2 Targeting firms in different industries5.3 Targeting firms in the same industry5.4 Industry-wide campaigns or firm-speci.c campaigns?5.5 Empirical Implications5.6 Appendix to Chapter 5 6 Conclusions: What Have We Learned? 6.1 Summary6.2 Lessons for scholars and practitioners6.3 Where do we go from here?

Abito, Besanko, and Diermeier have produced a masterful study of firms facing challenges to their reputations by social activists seeking to induce greater corporate social responsibility and self-regulation.The study is based on formal, dynamic theory and computational economics that reveal intriguing insights into firm and activist strategies, including reputation management, campaign intensity, and target selection.