Categorical Cognition and Outcome Efficiency in Impact Investing Decisions

Abstract

Research Summary The emerging practice of “impact investing” optimizes both financial and social outcomes, and thus promises to support hybrid organizations that simultaneously pursue financial and social goals. We argue, however, that impact investing decisions may be prone to behavioral factors that limit their outcome efficiency. In a portfolio allocation task designed to reflect the essential features of an impact investing decision, we find across a range of scenarios that individuals systematically fail to choose investment portfolios that achieve financial and social outcomes efficiently and thereby waste opportunities for value creation. We further show in online and in‐person experiments that outcome inefficiency is related to “categorical cognition”: suppression of categorical labels on investment options increases efficiency. Managerial Summary The “impact investing” approach promises to encourage greater financial investments in hybrid organizations that pursue a combination of financial and social goals. We experimentally demonstrate a challenge of this approach: People struggle to identify portfolios of investments that simultaneously optimize across financial and social outcomes. This is partly due to “categorical cognition”: a natural tendency to view investments in terms of known categories rather than the actual outcomes they produce. Our experiments show that removing the labels “for‐profit company,” “charity,” and “social enterprise” from investment options—thus making it more difficult to think about them categorically—increases outcome‐efficient allocations. We therefore show that realizing the full potential of impact investing will require that investors transcend conventional thinking about business and charity as separate domains.