Boycotting and Buycotting as Third-Party Punishment and Reward
This paper experimentally demonstrates that buyers engage in boycotting and "buycotting" in order to respectively punish and reward a seller's policies of which they are neither the victim nor the beneficiary. Notably, the experimental results show that third-party punishment and reward occurs even when the mechanism for executing such punishment and reward is not straightforward and when no punishment (reward) may be viewed as the neutral or default choice. This paper also finds that the average buyer does not condition her boycotting and buycotting decisions on the actions of other buyers. Those buyers who condition their buycotting behavior on others' actions follow one of two distinct patterns, each of which is predictive of behavior in other buycotting settings. These patterns of behavior may be explained by differences in buyers' aversion to different types of guilt.
Dimitry Mezhvinsky is a recipient of a small research grant from Ohio State's BDM Initiative.
