Research On The Relationship Between Corporate Voluntary Social Responsibility Information Disclosure And Product Market Competitive Position

Voluntary social responsibility information is the information disclosed initiatively by listed companies,rather than the basic information according to the generally accepted accounting principles or specific requirements of the securities regulatory authorities.It is a supplement and extension of mandatory social responsibility information.And the main purpose of listed companies to disclose those information is to show advantage in terms of social responsibility and establish a good social image so that it can obtain the trust of the stakeholders and improve the product market competition.In recent years,more and more listed companies voluntarily release CSR reporting.Selecting the listed companies which voluntarily released social responsibility report at Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange during 2010-2014 as a sample,this paper studies the interaction between voluntary social responsibility information disclosure and product market competition.In the theoretical analysis,it is mainly about the motivation,influence factors and economic consequences of social responsibility information disclosure and the impact of product market competition on social responsibility information disclosure.Moreover,it uses the stakeholder theory,asymmetric information theory and signal display theory to support the mechanism of information disclosure.In the empirical research,this paper divided the social responsibility information disclosure level into two aspects of quantity and quality to study the interaction between voluntary social responsibility information disclosure and product market competition status.Through the research,we draw the following conclusions:(1)The overall quality of voluntary CSR reporting is not high,reaching only about 50% of the index evaluation system.Furthermore,there is a large score gap between listed companies.(2)There are interaction effects between voluntary social responsibility information disclosure and product market competition status.On the one hand,the current product market competition status affects the current voluntary social responsibility information disclosure level,the higher the product market competition status,the more corporate voluntary social responsibility information disclosure.On the other hand,current voluntary social responsibility disclosure level has a positive impact on the next issue of the product market competition status,namely the more voluntary social responsibility disclosure,the higher the next issue of the product market competition status.The innovation of the paper may be:(1)The previous studies lessly broken social responsibility information disclosure into two categories,mandatory disclosure and voluntary disclosure.This paper carries on the segmentation and mainly studies the voluntary social responsibility disclosure of the enterprises.(2)On the basis of existing research,this paper clarifies the relationship between voluntary social responsibility information disclosure and product market competition status.Not only the voluntary information disclosure level has influence on product market competition status and,in turn,product market competition status affects voluntary information disclosure level.