关键词: 社会责任, 分担策略, 风险规避

Abstract: In recent years, with economic development, social issues such as food safety, product quality, and environmental pollution have frequently occurred, leading to increased attention to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) across all sectors of society. In order to encourage companies to take on CSR and promote social progress, many countries and governments have implemented various policy measures. For instance, in April 2015, Shenzhen introduced the Corporate Social Responsibility Requirements and Corporate Social Responsibility Evaluation Guidelines to standardize CSR norms and guide CSR work. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly concerned about whether companies are fulfilling their CSR obligations, prompting more businesses to incorporate CSR into their market decision-making processes, aiming to enhance their image and improve profitability. A survey by The Economist revealed that approximately 85% of corporate executives and investors consider CSR an important factor in investment decisions. However, companies undertaking social responsibility in the supply chain face considerable cost pressures. As a result, collaboration between upstream and downstream partners in the supply chain has become a feasible strategy. In practice, many companies proactively shoulder CSR costs for upstream manufacturers or share them in their CSR efforts. For example, FOTILE invests in hiring consulting firms to implement on-site lean improvement projects for strategic suppliers, ensuring product quality and safety. Bayers collaborate with upstream suppliers, such as the Penglai Haorizi Fruit Professional Rural Cooperative, to provide technical guidance and jointly address food safety issues. However, as consumer demand becomes increasingly diversified, companies often struggle to accurately capture market demand, leading them to adopt risk-averse measures when faced with the potential risks of demand uncertainty. A company's risk-averse attitude can significantly impact its market strategies. Clearly, CSR-sharing strategies, as a form of supply chain cooperation, are also influenced by companies' risk-averse attitudes. However, there is limited literature comparing different CSR-sharing strategies in supply chains, and no research has yet considered the impact of corporate risk-aversion on CSR-sharing strategies between companies.
To address these issues, this study considers a supply chain system consisting of a risk-neutral manufacturer and a risk-averse retailer. Two cooperation models for sharing CSR costs and efforts are established, and the influence of the retailer's risk aversion on different cooperation models is analyzed. The study finds that: when the retailer is risk-neutral, CSR-sharing contracts can promote CSR adoption and supply chain optimization, with the cooperative model sharing the manufacturer's CSR efforts being superior to the model sharing CSR costs. However, when the retailer is risk-averse, CSR-sharing contracts may not necessarily lead to supply chain optimization. Under certain conditions, when the risk-aversion attitude is sufficiently high, CSR-sharing cooperation in the supply chain can lower the expected utility for both the manufacturer and retailer, and even reduce the overall CSR efforts within the supply chain. When the risk-aversion attitude is low, the effort-sharing strategy will be still superior to the cost-sharing strategy.
This paper only considers a supply chain system composed of a single manufacturer and a single retailer. Future research could explore situations involving competition among upstream manufacturers. Additionally, further studies could investigate CSR cooperation strategies under information asymmetry in the supply chain.

Key words: social responsibility, sharing strategy, risk aversion