Sustainability investments require near-term costs, but the benefits may not accrue until the future. Decision makers often focus on present costs rather than delayed benefits, making sustainability investments difficult. We focus on supplier-retailer negotiations to examine strategies retailers can use to ‘nudge’ suppliers into sustainability investments that yield long-term societal and environmental benefits. To this end, we conducted controlled experiments to identify mechanisms that enhance sustainability investments, specifically examining the effects of temporal and benefit framing. The findings indicate that presenting decision makers with a distant temporal frame, compared to a proximal one, increases investment amounts. Results regarding benefit framing were mixed, suggesting that concretizing sustainability benefits can help but their effectiveness may depend on other factors. These insights provide retailers with strategies to foster openness to sustainability investments. They may also have broader implications for enhancing socially responsible behavior in organizations by providing decision makers with actionable steps to nudge their collaborators to consider long-term impacts.
