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 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who wish to organize boycotts, and to assist managers who wish to develop appropriate strategic responses. Boycotts, like many other instances 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.