To thine own self be true: a moderated moderated mediation of corporation social responsibility model

ABSTRACT This research examines what roles authenticity plays in consumers’ perception of a firm’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We expect that consumers have high expectations when perceiving the genuine intent of CSR – their perceptions are formed by what the firm signals it will do through certain types of CSR activities and how much it will benefit from them. When these genuine intentions are found to be false, or disconfirmed, firms will be worse off than if they had not signalled ‘genuine’ intent to begin with. Our results suggest that the expected CSR payoffs moderate the moderation of the indirect effect of CSR fraud perceptions on the purchase intention through ethical CSR beliefs by the CSR activity types, especially when the CSR actions are dominated by social activities with low expected firm benefits.