Do LGBTQ-Supportive Corporate Policies Affect Consumer Behavior? Evidence from the Video Game Industry

This paper empirically examines how consumers react when a company marks a product with a gay label. The company under scrutiny is one of the largest video game developers in the world, and the labeled product is a popular video game character. We use a regression discontinuity design to exploit the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of business ethics Vol. 187; no. 3; pp. 421 - 432
Main Authors Parshakov, Petr, Naidenova, Iuliia, Gomez-Gonzalez, Carlos, Nesseler, Cornel
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.10.2023
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Brand loyalty
Business and Management
Business Ethics
Companies
Computer & video games
Consumer behavior
Consumers
Discontinuity
Education
Employees
Ethics
LGBTQ people
Management
Original Paper
Personality
Personnel policies
Philosophy
Purchase intention
Quality of Life Research
Quasi-experimental methods
Robustness
Same sex marriage
Scrutiny
Social responsibility
Stakeholders
LGBTQ-inclusive policy
Consumer behavior
Discrimination
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Summary:This paper empirically examines how consumers react when a company marks a product with a gay label. The company under scrutiny is one of the largest video game developers in the world, and the labeled product is a popular video game character. We use a regression discontinuity design to exploit the quasi-experimental setting. The main finding was significant drop in demand for this character and a return to previous levels after approximately 3 months. Possible mechanisms and dynamics were explored by analyzing demand for other characters and by surveying consumers. The results are consistent after performing robustness checks based on grid search, subsampling, and placebo tests.
ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-022-05137-7