An Agent-Based Model of Sustainable Corporate Social Responsibility Activities

Abstract

An agent-based model of firms and their stakeholders' economic actions was used to test the theoretical feasibility of sustainable corporate social responsibility activities. Corporate social responsibility has become important to many firms, but CSR activities tend to get less attention during busts than during boom times. The hypothesis tested is that the CSR activities of a firm are more economically rational if the economic actions of its stakeholders reflect the firm's level of CSR. Our model focuses on three types of stakeholders: workers, consumers, and shareholders. First, we construct a uniform framework based on a microeconomic foundation that includes these stakeholders and the corresponding firms. Then, we formulate parameters for CSR in this framework. Our aim is to identify the conditions under which every type of stakeholder derives benefits from a firm's CSR activities. We simulated our model with heterogeneous agents by computer using several scenarios. For each one, the simulation was run 100 times with different random seeds. We first simulated the homogeneous version discussed above to verify the concept of our model. Next, we simulated the case in which workers had heterogeneous abilities, the firms had cost for CSR activities, and the workers, consumers, and shareholders had zero CSR awareness. We tested the robustness of our simulation results by using sensitivity analysis. Specifically, we investigated the conditions for the pecuniary advantage of CSR activities and effects offsetting benefits of CSR activities. Finally, we developed a new model installed bounded rational and simulated. The results show that the economic actions of stakeholders during boom periods greatly affect the sustainability of CSR activities during slow periods. This insight should lead to a feasible and effective prescription for sustainable CSR activities.