PACIS 2022 Proceedings

Paper Number

1838

Abstract

The Industrial Internet Platform, promoting cooperation between complementors, attracts entrepreneurs’ active engagements. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs will evaluate platforms’ ESG (environmental, social, governance) attributes when choosing platforms. However, we lack a comprehensive understanding of how ESG impact entrepreneurs’ choice. The literature mainly resorts to platforms’ sustainability strategies, but entrepreneurs, as industrial platforms’ users, are neglected. In this paper, we investigate users’ trade-off strategies and their beliefs towards the profitability of platforms of various ESG levels in an incentivized lab experiment. We employed a discrete choice experiment to obtain subjects’ willingness to pay (WTPs) on different ESG levels and other determinators. We find, subjects were likely to forgo a 3.1% annual return to gain a high ESG level. Moreover, we find that high ESG level increased subjects’ profitability expectation of the platform. Our results contribute to the understanding of why entrepreneurs pursue high ESG level platforms and the design of sustainability policies.

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Paper Number 1838

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