Psychological characteristics of potential SRI investors and its motivation in Japan: an experimental approach

This paper aims to identify psychological characteristics of potential investors of socially responsible investment (SRI) in Japan to explain its possible motivation by economic experiments. We asked subjects to make decisions regarding stock investments on the basis of three attributes of return, variance, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). We also conducted a dictator game and two lottery-choice experiments to measure subjects’ psychological characteristics: altruism, risk aversion, and time discount rate. Applying a conditional logit model as well as mixed logit model, we found that people who have a higher time discount rate tend to be SRI investors.