The Boycott Puzzle: Consumer Motivations For Sacrifice

ABSTRACT - This paper takes both economics and psychology seriously in a study of boycotts. Boycotts, like voting and many other problems of collective action, are subject to free-rider and small-agent problems: there appears to be little or no motivation for an individual to participate. Yet boycotts assuredly occur. Standard theory offers little in the way of explanation of collective action in the fact of free-rider and small-agent problems. Our approach is to incorporate the motivations that psychology might suggest into a dynamic economic model where individuals behave rationally. Specifically, we develop a taxonomy of motivations for boycotts, and then model these motivations explicitly in an economic model.

Citation:

A. Andrew John and Jill Klein (2001) ,"The Boycott Puzzle: Consumer Motivations For Sacrifice", in AP - Asia Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 4, eds. Paula M. Tidwell and Thomas E. Muller, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 81.

Asia Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 4, 2001      Page 81

THE BOYCOTT PUZZLE: CONSUMER MOTIVATIONS FOR SACRIFICE

A. Andrew John, INSEAD, France

Jill Klein, INSEAD, France

ABSTRACT -

This paper takes both economics and psychology seriously in a study of boycotts. Boycotts, like voting and many other problems of collective action, are subject to free-rider and small-agent problems: there appears to be little or no motivation for an individual to participate. Yet boycotts assuredly occur. Standard theory offers little in the way of explanation of collective action in the fact of free-rider and small-agent problems. Our approach is to incorporate the motivations that psychology might suggest into a dynamic economic model where individuals behave rationally. Specifically, we develop a taxonomy of motivations for boycotts, and then model these motivations explicitly in an economic model.

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