The Boycott Puzzle: Consumer Motivations for Purchase Sacrifice

A boycott is never far from a firm’s exchanges with its customers. Researchers in marketing need to understand consumer protest behavior, both to aid NGOs who wish to organize boycotts and to assist managers who wish to develop appropriate strategic responses. Boycotts, like many other problems of collective action, are subject to free-rider and small-agent problems: there appears to be little or no motivation for an individual to participate. Yet they assuredly occur. We take an economic and psychological approach to the study of boycotts. Our approach is to develop a typology of motivations for consumer boycotts, to embed these motivations explicitly in a dynamic economic model, and thus to offer explanations for the extent of boycott participation. ∗Andrew John, AJK Consulting ([email protected]); Jill Klein, INSEAD ([email protected]). Published in Management Science, 49 (9), 2003, pp. 1196-1209. We received helpful comments from: Randy Heeb, Joshua Klayman, and Craig Smith; seminar participants at the INSEAD Behavioral Brownbag, the Association for Consumer Research, Gold Coast, Australia, March 2001, and Pompeu Fabra University, June 2001; four anonymous referees, and the Associate Editor of this journal. Contribution was equal, and order of authorship is alphabetical.