Bosch-Badia Maria-Teresa, Montllor-Serrats Joan, Tarrazon-Rodon Maria-Antonia
Department of Economics, Universitat de Girona, Campus de Montiliví, 17071, Girona, Spain.
Business Department, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Campus de Bellaterra, 08193, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Spain.
PLoS One. 2015 May 4;10(5):e0125972. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0125972. eCollection 2015.
In contemporary complex societies, social values like ethics, corporate social responsibility, and being respectful with the environment, among others, are becoming social requirements. Corporations are expected to fulfill them and, according to empirical evidence, an overwhelming majority aspires to good social valuation. At the same time, the maximization of market share value in the long run continues to be the central corporate goal. Making environmental and social expenses compatible with value creation is a central challenge for corporations since it implies the financial sustainability of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
The value creation capacity of CSR projects, mainly through innovation, is widely acknowledged in economic literature and corporate practice. This fact arouses the need of having a quantitative framework capable of summarizing the value creation capacity of the variables involved in CSR projects. With this aim we build up a sensitivity analysis of real option ratios that studies and quantifies the value creation capacity of CSR projects connected with innovation. Ratio analysis has the advantage of being scale independent. Hence, it furnishes a homogeneous framework to express the interaction of value creation variables and, thus, supports strategic thinking quantitatively. Often, CSR expenses can be regarded as preliminary projects that create the opportunity to undertake a full future project. For them, we obtain the minimum expectations scenario that makes financially sustainable a preliminary project that can be interpreted as a call option. We propose a classification of CSR projects from the decision analysis perspective following a two-fold approach: Their relationship with value creation and their links with existing corporate activities. This classification of CSR projects aims at contributing to choose the best capital budgeting method to study the financial sustainability of the project and identifying those CSR projects that fulfill the required features to be studied from the real options perspective.
在当代复杂社会中，诸如道德、企业社会责任以及尊重环境等社会价值观正成为社会要求。企业理应践行这些价值观，并且根据实证证据，绝大多数企业都渴望获得良好的社会评价。与此同时，从长远来看，市场份额价值的最大化仍是企业的核心目标。使环境和社会支出与价值创造相兼容，是企业面临的一项核心挑战，因为这意味着企业社会责任（CSR）的财务可持续性。
企业社会责任项目的价值创造能力，主要通过创新来实现，这在经济文献和企业实践中已得到广泛认可。这一事实引发了对一个定量框架的需求，该框架能够总结企业社会责任项目中所涉及变量的价值创造能力。出于这一目的，我们构建了实物期权比率的敏感性分析，以研究和量化与创新相关的企业社会责任项目的价值创造能力。比率分析具有与规模无关的优势。因此，它提供了一个统一的框架来表达价值创造变量之间的相互作用，从而在定量上支持战略思考。通常，企业社会责任支出可被视为创造未来全面项目机会的初步项目。对于这些项目，我们得出了使一个可被解释为看涨期权的初步项目在财务上具有可持续性的最低期望情景。我们从决策分析的角度，采用双重方法对企业社会责任项目进行分类：它们与价值创造的关系以及它们与现有企业活动的联系。这种企业社会责任项目分类旨在有助于选择最佳的资本预算方法来研究项目的财务可持续性，并识别那些符合从实物期权角度进行研究所需特征的企业社会责任项目。
