OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Socially responsible investment (SRI) has been extremely popular among investors in the past decade. However, the reasons for this interest are not completely clear. The prevailing theoretical explanations rely on assumptions of some form of altruistic preferences that nevertheless fall short of accounting for various known phenomena related to SRI. Using well-known and well-documented experimental tasks, we test the alternative hypothesis that SRI behavior is motivated by the desire to comply with social norms. In our experiment, the behavior of our participants goes against the predictions of pure social preferences models. However, it fits well with the idea of choosing SRI because it is socially appropriate. We provide multiple lines of evidence that corroborate this hypothesis. Our results suggest that promoting norms related to SRI is the key to sustain high interest in SRI.
