Experimental Design Details
In our study “Objective versus Perceived Corporate Treatments to Individuals’ Understanding of Corporate Sustainability Information,” we recruit a broad sample of individuals from different backgrounds and randomly assign them to one of a large set of presentation-formats of actual corporate emissions data. Specifically:
- The core task asks participants to rate a firm’s “greenness” on a 1 to 5 scale; the ratings correspond to quintiles of real firms’ emissions distributions.
- We vary the emissions metric: (i) absolute emissions; (ii) emissions relative to revenue; (iii) emissions per household‐equivalent (translating corporate emissions into the number of average households).
- We also vary contextual information: participants see past and future emission trajectories and firm emissions compared to the industry median (also presented as "average") or to the min/max of the distribution.
- In a parallel specification, we provide financial information rather than sustainability information, allowing a comparison of comprehension and response between sustainability vs. financial information.
- Further, we embed an incentivization treatment: some participants receive a monetary bonus if they correctly identify the quintile in which the firm’s emissions fall, thereby testing how incentivization affects performance.
- The experiment covers three industries (apparel, automotive, utilities) and each participant navigates a “journey” of three successive tasks: past emissions, future projections, and a comparison case under one of the specification variations described above.
- We use ficitional company names for most settings but test for robustness by using one automotive case with real company names.