Corporate Social Responsibility: Overseeing a Smooth Transition to a Sustainable Regime of Making Business: A Game Theoretical Analysis

Corporate Social Responsibility: Overseeing a Smooth Transition to a Sustainable Regime of Making Business: A Game Theoretical Analysis

Diaz del Valle Hernandez, M.A.

Cunningham, S. (mentor)

Technology, Policy and Management

Policy Analysis

Engineering and Policy Analysis

2011-09-02

The following is a graduation project, it is a meticulous study that uses “Actor-centered institutionalism” as a theoretical framework as well as “game theory” and several “policy analysis techniques” to analyze and study Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). It presupposes a hypothetical problem owner, “The United Nations Compact Initiative” (UNCI). The thesis starts with argumentation as to why, an improved version of the currently working model of CSR, would benefit the UNCI. These benefits revolve around establishing a link between business and development. The author’s hypothesis states that an established link between business and development would further improve the possibilities of achieving the “Millennium Development Goals” (MDG), and that the way to establish this link is through an improved version of the CSR model. CSR is a complex issue and many approaches have been used to study it, a literature background review on the subject was performed to clarify values and arguments. These values and arguments were later used as input to design a theoretical game model. These models are highly sensitive to the subjective input of the modeler. The policy analysis techniques along with the simplification tools of ACI provided transparency and a degree of objectivity to the assumptions made in order to design and develop the model. The non-cooperative game model developed is descriptive in nature, it listed the possible outcomes that can be reached given the constraints of the rules put in place. The model and the literature review led the author to conclude that an improved model of CSR would entail: easy access to information, skilled labor in the domain of CSR, and a mixture of self and government regulations to govern corporate industries. Future recommendations to improve the model are making the model more specific as it is a very general and highly aggregated model designed to aid in the identification of the knowledge gaps and domains where macro-policies should be improved. A cooperative game theory approach is suggested as the next step to analyze factors that were not studied in depth in this dissertation. These factors are those of specific coalitions and side-payments.

Game Theory
Actor-Centered Institutionalism
Corporate Social Responsibility
Self-Regulation
Networks

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b3cbc9d6-644c-4f73-8dbe-54c8b8a53114

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Diaz del Valle Hernandez, M.A.