Contribution of corporate social responsibility to the shareholder value: experimental perspective

The article deals with the possibility of the Corporate Social Responsibility concept to increase the shareholder value. This value is expressed as Economic Value Added in conjunction with business science. Firstly, the theoretical analysis of separate parts of EVA is carried out and the influence of CSR on EVA is discussed. Mostly the neutral or negative effect is deducted and only one possibility of positive effect is identified, namely in the possibility of using CSR to increase the firm's revenues. This could be realized only on condition of customers’ altruism. Only altruistic customers are willing to pay higher price to help some other people. The second part of the article describes and sums up our own experiment on altruism testing. We modified the standard one-round design of the Dictator Game in three ways: firstly, more rounds are played, secondly, we differentiate stable and unstable pairs of players and thirdly, we differentiate certain and uncertain ends of the game. According to the second and third points we have obtained four different experimental sessions. We used standard methods of experimental economics as regards the instructions and subjects' motivation. Each session was played twice so that one hundred and sixty students could participate on this experiment. More than three thousand figures were acquired. Then the three hypotheses of altruistic or egoistic behavior were tested. The ANOVA, the sign test, and the paired t-test were carried out. The egoistic behavior was confirmed twice and one time we could not confirm either egoistic or altruistic behavior of experimental subjects. According to these the CSR cannot increase shareholder value