Cunha, MarianaMota, Filipa2020-12-112020-12-112020Cunha, M., Mota, F. (2020). Coordinated Effects of Corporate Social Responsibility. Journal of Industry, Competition & Trade, 20, 617–6411566-1679http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/31471This paper analyzes the coordinated effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a setting where firms take into account in their objective function the consumer’s welfare in addition to their profits, produce differentiated products, and compete in quantities. We consider a symmetric case, where firms have the same level of CSR and an asymmetric case, where firms have different levels of CSR. Our results confirm that assigning a positive weight to consumer surplus makes collusion harder to sustain, as shown in the literature. However, for a sufficiently high level of CSR, collusion sustainability is actually increasing in the degree of product substitutability when firms are CSR-symmetric. When firms are CSR-asymmetric, collusion sustainability is increasing in the degree of product differentiation if products are complements. Furthermore, we show that collusion may be welfare-improving when firms adopt a socially responsible behavior, which provides an interesting background to competition authorities when analysing cartel cases.engCollusionCorporate social responsibilityProduct differentiationjournal article10.1007/s10842-020-00344-21573-7012WOS:000548764800001