Shuili Du

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of New Hampshire

By engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, companies can not only generate favorable stakeholder attitudes and better support behaviors (e.g. purchase, seeking employment, investing in the company), but also, over the long run, build corporate image, strengthen stakeholder–company relationships, and enhance stakeholders' advoc...

Sustainability and social media use in open innovation play important roles in a firm’s new product development (NPD) process. This research examines, in conjunction, the roles of sustainability and social media driven inbound open innovation for a firm’s NPD performance, and further, takes a more refined approach by differentiating between differe...

Public policy makers seek to enhance disclosure of firms' sustainability performance, yet firms debate about whether, or to what extent, they should engage in sustainability reporting. This paper seeks to advance current understanding about the business returns to sustainability reporting by examining the short- and long-term investor reactions. Th...

Products and services empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming widespread in today’s marketplace. However, consumers have mixed feelings about AI technologies due to the numerous ethical challenges associated the development and deployment of AI. Drawing upon prior research on the moral significance of technology and the emerging lite...

This research investigates the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm innovation. Drawing upon the literatures on CSR and the knowledge-based view, we conceptualize that a firm's CSR programs enable it to build broader and deeper relationship networks with its stakeholders, facilitating the sharing and exchange of external know...

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the influence of consumer–brand values deviation on consumer reactions transactionally (i.e. purchase intention) and relationally (i.e. brand loyalty) and uncover two important boundary conditions, namely, cause controversy and consumption goal. Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses online surveys to...

The urgent need to address unsustainable consumption practices has become increasingly evident. While much traditional consumer behavior research serves to stimulate consumption, the focus needs to shift towards encouraging more sustainable consumption patterns. This commentary synthesizes insights from a roundtable discussion at the 2023 Society f...

Online crowdsourcing platforms have rapidly become a popular source of data collection. Despite the various advantages these platforms offer, there are substantial concerns regarding not only data validity issues, but also the ethical, societal, and global ramifications arising from the prevalent use of online crowdsourcing platforms. This paper se...

This paper aims to identify breach- and firm-level characteristics that may account for the heterogenous stock market reaction to data breaches. Drawing upon the screening theory, this paper examines the possibility of three breach characteristics (breach severity, breach locus, and breach controllability) and two firm attributes (CEO stock ownersh...

In this article, the co-editors of the corporate responsibility: quantitative issues section of the journal provide an overview of the quantitative CSR field and offer some new perspectives on where the field is going. They highlight key issues in developing impactful, theory-driven, and ethically grounded research and call for research that examin...

Drawing upon the Brands as Intentional Agents Framework, this study investigates the impact of claim specificity of green advertising on consumers’ reactions toward the brand, and reveals a double-edged effect of claim specificity that depends on the dimensions of the brand’s image (perceived competence/warmth). Through two experiments, we show tha...

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Technology, Megatrends and Work. Of all the profound changes...

Individual social responsibility is essential to achieving the sustainable development goals of the society, yet there has been very little research on whether and how social and cultural factors influence individual social responsibility. Using the Covid-19 pandemic as our empirical context, this research examines the relationship between social c...

Although researchers and managers have examined various business outcomes of sustainability, the literature offers little insight into how firms could cultivate a higher level of sustainability focus in their NPD endeavors. Drawing upon the literature on sustainability and new product innovation and using a competency-based and dynamic capabilities...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting is becoming mainstream, yet there is limited research on whether and how CSR reports communicate value relevant information. We examine the effects of CSR report readability and tone on future CSR performance and the market reaction around the release of CSR reports. Using a hand-collected dataset of...

Extant literature suggests that individuals contribute to crowdsourcing programs in various ways but offers few insights about whether participants' creative contributions (original new product submissions) or their evaluative contributions (scoring or commenting on others' submissions) have a greater impact on their ability to create commercializa...

Abstract: The use of beauty images in advertising has been generally deemed to be unethical in society, based on the general negative presupposition in modern western culture. The ethicalness of the display of high standards of beauty in advertisements is especially controversial and questionable in the advertising industry. Advertising watchdog...

We find that firms with higher CSR performance are more likely to choose Big N auditors and less likely to switch to non-Big N auditors, consistent with socially responsible firms demanding higher audit quality. Furthermore, we provide robust evidence that firms with higher CSR performance pay lower audit fees using both levels and changes models,...

Based on the central premise that corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions are inherently moral acts, we draw upon moral foundations theory to investigate the extent to which consumers’ moral foundations affect their pro-company behaviors based on CSR domains. In two studies, our results reveal that when consumers’ moral foundations are congru...

In July 2017, the University of New Hampshire hosted and co-sponsored the third triennial PDMA-UNH Doctoral Consortium. As in the two prior events held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Consortium brought together leading new product development (NPD) and innovation scholars and practitioners, as well as sixteen of some of the most prom...

Companies increasingly communicate about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. A key motivator for such communication efforts is that consumers demand to know more about companies’ CSR activities. At the same time, consumers tend to be skeptical toward companies’ CSR claims. Many consumers consider that companies engage in CSR com...

Social initiatives that make a difference for the consumers are able to win consumers’ hearts and build close and lasting relationships. A program that offers real participation and goes beyond the standard marketing mix can therefore effectively reshape the competitive game with a market leader. Key consumer/societal problems present unprecedented...

This paper reviews the substantial body of work on corporate social responsibility (CSR), including the synonymous domains of cause-related marketing and ethical consumption, to synthesize the diverse findings on consumer responses to CSR. CSR is capable of engendering a range of company-favoring perceptions and behaviors, driven by both consumers’...

This research investigates the interplay between leadership styles and institutional corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. A large-scale field survey of managers reveals that firms with greater transformational leadership are more likely to engage in institutional CSR practices, whereas transactional leadership is not associated with suc...

This paper examines how employees react to their organizations’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Drawing upon research in internal marketing and psychological contract theories, we argue that employees have multi-faceted job needs (i.e., economic, developmental, and ideological needs) and that CSR programs comprise an important me...

Being a controversial industry, oil companies turn to corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a means to obtain legitimacy. Adopting a case study methodology, this research examines the characteristics of CSR strategies and CSR communication tactics of six oil companies by analyzing their 2011–2012 web site content. We found that all six companies...

Corporate sustainability can be broadly defined as the pursuit of a business growth strategy by allocating financial or in-kind resources of the corporation to a social or environmental initiative. Today, more than ever, corporate sustainability has risen to the status of strategic business matter and demands supervision from the top. However, desp...

This research builds on the complementary corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures in strategy and marketing to provide insight into the efficacy of CSR as a challenger's competitive weapon against a market leader. Through an investigation of a real-world CSR initiative, we show that the challenger can reap superior business returns (i.e.,...

This chapter presents a general theory of love that applies across a broad range of contexts, including interpersonal and person-object situations. It draws in part on data from a larger study that included directly relevant questions about what consumers mean when they say they love something. The chapter uses the terms self and identity interchan...

This research investigates the impact of a corporate oral health initiative aimed at disadvantaged Hispanic families, especially the children. We find that the initiative promotes oral health behaviors only among less acculturated families. Moreover, it does so by both enhancing participant children's beliefs about the physical and psychosocial ben...

This research examines the moderating influence of the extent to which a brand's social initiatives are integrated into its competitive positioning (i.e., a CSR positioning) on consumer reactions to CSR. We find that positive CSR beliefs held by consumers are associated not only with greater purchase likelihood but also with longer-term loyalty and...

Investment in corporate social initiatives is escalating in accordance with the increasing recognition of the vast potential of such initiatives. For example, although it represents only a small proportion of overall corporate expenditure on social initiatives, U. S. corporate spending on cause-related marketing jumped from $125million in 1990 to a...