A consumer perspective on Corporate Digital Responsibility: an empirical evaluation of consumer preferences

Abstract

While digitalization offers numerous new possibilities for value creation, managers have to overcome a number of threats and obstacles that it harbors. In this context, the concept of Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) is of increasing interest to practitioners. Drawing on the well-established paradigm of Corporate Social Responsibility, CDR comprises a set of principles designed to encourage the ethical and conscientious development, adoption, and utilization of digital technologies. This work aims at contributing to the evolving research base by empirically assessing consumer preferences and a consumer segmentation approach with regard to companies’ concrete CDR activities, thus supporting the operationalization of CDR. Hence, this work provides concrete guidance for firms’ CDR activities in practice. To this end, a series of Best–Worst Scaling and dual response studies with a representative sample of 663 German-speaking participants assesses consumers’ perspectives on firms’ concrete (possible) activities within several CDR dimensions.