Responsible investment and responsible consumption

To maximize their impact, socially responsible households can invest responsibly (SRI), consume responsibly (SRC), or do both. The key question of this paper is, which mix of SRI and SRC leads to a desired impact with the lowest loss of utility for responsible households. In a closed micro-economic model, we show that both strategies yield a symmetric impact, proportional to the responsible behavior. For the individual household, however, one strategy dominates the other depending on a condition on risk and product parameters. If responsible households can coordinate on socially responsible action, the welfare maximizing action is to completely abstain from consuming and investing in brown production if the negative externality is high. The coordination on "abstaining" becomes more likely the more households are responsible.