“De (Corporate Responsibility) Gustibus Est Misurandum”: Heterogeneity and Consensus Around CR Indicators

Abstract

We investigate with an ad hoc survey respondents’ tastes about the different corporate responsibility (CR) items typically used by CR rating agencies. The hypotheses of equal average value weights given to different CR items and equal variance (which we consider as a proxy of the inverse of consensus on the importance of an indicator) are strongly rejected by our data both in our overall suvey sample and in more homogeneous subsamples based on gender, age, education and religious beliefs. We as well frequently reject the hypothesis that value weights for the same CR item are the same across different subpopulations in gender subsamples since women attribute significantly higher weights than men to many CR items when we do not correct for young respondents’ oversampling.