Associate Professor Pat Auger
Associate Professor Pat Auger - Information Systems & e-commerce
Before joining MBS in 2001, Pat was Assistant Professor, Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong and Visiting Professor, Ecole Superieure de Commerce et de Management (ESCEM), Tours, France. He has taught at the College of Business, Shanghai University of Science and Technology, PRC and School of Management, Syracuse University, US. He teaches across a range of award and executive programs at MBS.
Professor Auger's research background is in Information Systems and e-commerce, but more recently he has been actively involved in another field of research; Consumer Social Responsibility, or CSR.
Together with colleagues from the Australian Graduate School of Management and the University of Technology in Sydney, Pat has recently completed a global investigation into how ethical issues - such as child labour, damaging environmental operations and other similar issues - impact consumer purchasing choices.
The aim of this research was to investigate the extent to which consumers considered ethical issues when purchasing products. Existing research using customer surveys indicated that ethical issues were important for consumers, however using choice experiments, Pat and his colleagues found there was a significant difference in what consumers said compared to what they actually did when it came to purchasing a product.
"The evidence in terms of purchase shows that there is a gap,” Pat explains. “People will tell you they care about this stuff but when it comes down to buying the product they’re much more concerned about price, brand and other things.
"In general we found that a lot of studies have massively overestimated how much consumers care about the use of child labour and those kinds of issues. We found that, at the end of the day, consumers will consider those kinds of things but only if the products meets certain requirements. They won’t sacrifice product functionality for a lot of those issues."
Using a quantitative methodology, the researchers conducted interviews with over 1000 consumers across 8 countries. While not surprised at the overall findings, there were some unexpected results.
"What surprised us is that there are very few differences based on demographics. So whether people are from the US, Germany, Australia or Hong Kong we can see very few differences in respect to the importance of ethical consumerism. Also, we found that women don’t care more than men and older people don’t care more than younger people, and neither does income or education have much of an impact either. So the kinds of stereotypical things that we think about, like, more educated people tend to care more about this stuff is – as far as we could tell – nonsense."
The findings of this study are summarised in the latest edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The article "The Other CSR" discusses the implications for business and provides strategies corporations can take to sell socially responsible products in a seemingly tough market.
This field of research has been an ongoing area of study for Pat and his colleagues for the past six years. During that time, the team have received two large Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, produced a number of publications for both academic and management journals and presented at international conferences. Their research continues to expand, with a new project currently underway looking at how information systems affect consumers' purchase intentions.
Professor Auger's other main research interest is the strategic implications of e-commerce; how it drives value for business and how it can improve performance.
You can read a selection of Professor Auger’s working papers on the MBS website at http://www.mbs.edu/go/person/patrice-auger
Recent published articles include:
- "The Other CSR", Stanford Social Innovation Review
Fall 2006. Vol 4, Iss. 3) with co-authors Timothy Devinney, Giana Eckhardt and Thomas Birtchnell. - "Ethical Consumerism: reality or myth?" The Melbourne Review, Vol 2, No. 1 May 2006
- "Does What Consumers Say Matter? The Misalignment of Preferences with Unconstrained Ethical Intentions", Journal of Business Ethics, forthcoming (with T.Devinney).
Pat can be contacted at p.auger@mbs.edu
