Today, an increasing number of companies have publicized policies to improve corporate social responsibility performance related to human resources in their supply chain management practices, such as safer and healthier working conditions, higher payment, better benefits, and fewer working hours. However, there are still concerns about the sincerity and effectiveness of such efforts. This could be attributed to the fact that the economic benefit of those improvements is not clearly structured as an integral part in the companies’ decision-making process. In this paper, we develop a stylized analytic framework that links a firm's supply chain social performance in people with its economic performance in profit. Specifically, we examine how consumers’ responses to the outbreak of social misconduct in supply chains affect competing firms’ market segmentation and profit and subsequently provide economic incentive for proactive social responsibility investment. Closed-form optimal solutions for proactive social responsibility strategy are found for our model setup. Numerical tests and sensitivity analyses have been conducted to study the effects of various factors on the firms’ supply chain social responsibility strategies. Factors such as consumers’ ethical disposition, the social environment, and consumers’ perception of a product's functional versus social value are a few among them. The results of our analysis demonstrate that proactive investment in supply chain social responsibility can enhance a firm's competitive advantage and economic performance, thereby suggesting a profit-driven approach to achieving supply chain social responsibility and sustainability. “You have to be able to do good to do well.” –Julius Rosenwald 
A profit-driven approach to building a “people-responsible” supply chain