Teaching Economics to Business Students through the Lens of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability

Abstract

Corporate “social-issues management” courses are often taught without in-depth reference to economics, but they afford an opportunity both to review ground-level microeconomics issues including pricing and profit maximization under different market structures and to introduce more advanced topics such as externalities, introductory game theory, information asymmetry, antitrust law, and network and innovation economics. In a corporate social-issues management course grounded in economics, these concepts can be taught hand-in-glove with their relevance to the practice of corporate citizenship and sustainability.

Keywords:

• corporate social responsibility
• market failures
• sustainability

JEL code:

• A2

Notes

1. On the debate about whether economics teaching over- or underemphasizes the theory of market imperfections, see Hill and Myatt (2007) and Pashigian and Self (2007).