This study examines the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) news reports on corporate operating performance forecasting using a large database of publicly-listed electronics firms in Taiwan. Applying text mining techniques and latent topic modelling, we construct and measure the intensity of the CSR-corpus index (ICSRI), which can compress tremendous amounts of CSR textual information content into synthesized meaningful dimensions. By doing so, we are able to break down CSR news reports into multiple dimensions and then examine which dimension(s) affects operating performance. To offer decision-makers with a comprehensive, overarching view of the corporate’s operations, this study incorporates balanced scorecards (BSC) and multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to form a final performance rank. The proposed approach, supported by real samples, can assist both internal and external stakeholders in allocating scarce resources to specific CSR dimensions to enhance a corporate’s growth potential as well as to achieve a win-win situation.

It is widely recognized that a firm’s well-established corporate governance (CG) has a considerable impact on its corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. How to determine the main trigger among CG’s indicators for strengthening CSR performance is thus an urgent and complicated task due to its (i.e., CSR) multi-dimensional and numerous perspectives. In order to solve this critical problem, the study breaks down CSR into four dimensions and further examines the impact of CG’s indicators on each CSR dimension by joint utilization of rough set theory (RST) and decision tree (DT). By doing so, users can realize which one CG indicator is the most essential to CSR performance. Managers can take the results as a reference to allocate valuable and scarce resources to the right place so as to enhance CSR performance in the future. To solidify our research finding, we transform the CSR forecasting model selection into a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) task and execute a MCDM algorithm. By implementing the MCDM algorithm, users can achieve a much more reliable and consensus decision in today’s highly turbulent economic environment. The proposed mechanism, examined by real cases, is a promising alternative for CSR performance forecasting.