Do consumers place a monetary value on supply-chain visibility? Are they willing to pay more for a product that is “socially responsible”?

A new study led by two professors at the MIT Sloan School of Management suggests that the answer is yes – at least to a point. Tim Kraft, visiting assistant professor of operations management, and Karen Zheng, associate professor of operations management, set up a “behavioral lab” that mimicked the dynamics of a real-world supply chain. It consisted of a three-player game, with participants playing the roles of consumer, seller and worker. The experiment examined whether a consumer is willing to pay more for a given product if the seller provides visibility into its treatment of factory workers. The decisions of all players directly impacted their ultimate payments. So how much of a premium did the “consumers” agree to pay for products of the socially responsible “seller”? How did their actions affect the lot of the “worker”? And can a limited experiment of this type really mirror behavior in the real world? Hosted by Bob Bowman, managing editor of SupplyChainBrain.

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Show notes:

The MIT study on Supply Chain Visibility and Social Responsibility.