If you frame a coupon as a way to 'steal resources' from a big corporation, twice as many people will jump through hoops to get it.
March 17, 2026
Original Paper
Robin Hood in a Field Experiment: Moral Framing, Discontent with Big Business, and Consumer Behavior
SSRN · 6323661
The Takeaway
Contrary to the idea that people prefer to engage with 'friendly' or 'small' businesses, this field experiment with 77,000 customers found that anti-corporate sentiment can actually drive engagement. People were twice as likely to participate when they viewed the act as a 'Robin Hood' opportunity to take money back from a large firm.
From the abstract
We investigate how framing-based information about a large corporation shapes anticorporate behavior in a large-scale real-effort field experiment with a Fortune 500 firm and about 77,000 customers. Participants were offered a low-value coupon that required substantial effort to claim, making participation economically unattractive. Participation varied sharply with how we framed the sponsoring firm and the claiming act: labeling the sponsor as a large corporation and framing claiming as an oppo