Social Responsibility Decision-Making of Universities in Stackelberg Competition

Abstract

This paper establishes a Stackelberg competition model of two universities considering social responsibility (SR) and market sensitivity (MS) and examines the equilibrium results of four different scenarios: only the leader implements SR; only the follower implements SR; both the leader and the follower implement SR; neither the leader nor the follower implements SR. Then, a comparative analysis is carried out on the influence of MS and SR level. The results show that the influence of MS depends on SR implementation instead of competitive position. If MS is sufficiently high, two universities have the motive to implement more SR; under different competition scenarios, universities make different SR decisions, but the leader and the government make the same decisions on the optimal SR level. Therefore, the government could encourage the leader to take SR first.