Social responsibility by and support for merchants from the public's perspective

Public support for or antipathy toward merchants emerges to be a salient concern, due to the growth of commercialization and economic inequality in many industrialized societies. Accordingly, many of the public blame merchants for enlarging economic inequality and thus withdraw their support for merchants. As public support for merchants is essentially crucial for merchants' performance and profit making, the support merits attention. An expected contribution to the public support is the social responsibility of merchants. Nevertheless, conditions for the contribution are not empirically transparent, and the empirical clarification of the conditions is vital and necessary for the present study. The study thereby employs the public's perspective to investigate conditions for the contribution of the social responsibility of rich merchants informed in society to public support for merchants, with a survey of 731 residents in Hong Kong, China. As expected, results affirm the contribution, even after controlling for prior support for merchants. What is more, results importantly unveil that one who had more adult family members, lower morale, longer residency, higher education, or no religious faith showed a greater emphasis on merchants' social responsibility as a reason for support for merchants. Besides, one who had more family members, lower morale, higher family income per capita, or no religious faith manifested lower support for merchants. The results imply that information about corporate social responsibility is influential on corporate performance. Moreover, the results reveal conditions in the public that modify the influence.