Offering socially responsible products can increase the consumers’ willingness-to-pay a premium for the item, have a positive or negative spillover effect on the consumers’ perceived product image, increase the item's production and marketing costs, enable sales in new market segments and elicit market response from rivals. Earlier research assumes that when a socially responsible product is offered, consumers’ perception of its conventional (i.e., non-socially responsible) attributes remain unchanged. However, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that in addition to societal benefits, offering a socially responsible product can have spillover effects on consumers’ perceptions of the product's conventional characteristics and subsequently, its product image. We propose and analyze an economic equilibrium duopoly model where firms compete on price and products differentiated by their socially responsible attributes and conventional product image. Our model provides new insights into product-positioning and how failing to consider the interaction between socially responsible product offerings and spillover effects on product image can lead to suboptimal product-positioning decisions. Specifically, offering a socially responsible product can have a halo spillover effect on product image, but result in a profit loss for the firm. Furthermore, a high incremental cost of providing the socially responsible product and a large hardcore market segment can lead to a quasi-monopoly market structure where the firms earn their highest profits, if one provides the standard and the other the socially responsible product.

提供对社会负责的产品可以提高消费者为产品支付溢价的意愿，对消费者感知的产品形象产生正面或负面的溢出效应，增加产品的生产和营销成本，促进新细分市场的销售，以及引起竞争对手的市场反应。早期的研究假设，当提供社会责任产品时，消费者对其传统（即非社会责任）属性的看法保持不变。然而，轶事和经验证据表明，除了社会效益之外，提供对社会负责的产品还可以对消费者对产品传统特征的看法以及随后的产品形象产生溢出效应。我们提出并分析了一个经济均衡的双头垄断模型，在该模型中，企业在价格和产品上进行竞争，这些产品因其对社会负责的属性和传统产品形象而有所不同。我们的模型提供了对产品定位的新见解，以及如何不考虑对社会负责的产品供应与对产品形象的溢出效应之间的相互作用会导致次优的产品定位决策。具体而言，提供对社会负责的产品会对产品形象产生光环溢出效应，但会导致公司利润损失。此外，提供对社会负责的产品的高增量成本和庞大的核心细分市场可能导致企业获得最高利润的准垄断市场结构，