Citation: Albert, D. and Csaszar, F. A. (2026). Search heuristics under multiple objectives: The case of corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Review (forthcoming).
Paper highlights
Firms pursuing social and financial goals do not choose once from a fixed menu. They search step by step, and the rule used to judge each move changes which later alternatives they will ever discover. Two firms with similar stated priorities can therefore reach different outcomes because they implement those priorities through different search heuristics.
The most surprising result concerns alternating attention. Switching between financial and social improvement can dislodge a firm from a local financial peak and reveal an oblique strategy: one that improves social performance while matching or even exceeding the financial result found by profit-only local search.
Five search heuristics
- Maximize follows financial improvement alone.
- Combine evaluates a weighted total of financial and social performance.
- Alternate pursues one objective until stuck, then switches to the other.
- Penalize subtracts a penalty when social performance falls below a threshold.
- Satisfice attends to financial improvement only after clearing a social threshold.
Main results
Combine assesses financial and social performance together at every step. It typically stops at a balanced compromise near the top-right of the social–financial landscape and produces the strongest joint performance on average. Alternate evaluates one goal at a time and keeps searching after it reaches a local peak on either goal. Its average balance is lower, but it is more likely to escape the financial peak found by Maximize and discover an oblique strategy with better social performance and equal or higher financial performance.
Penalize usually reaches a financial-first objective with a minimum social threshold more effectively than Satisfice, even though both heuristics express that preference. Maximize produces the highest financial performance on average, but also the lowest social performance.
Heuristics that express similar preferences can still produce different outcomes. Penalize and Satisfice both place a condition on social performance, but they apply that condition at different points in the search. Combine and Alternate both attend to financial and social value, but one integrates them at every move while the other switches attention over time. The implementation rule changes the path, and the path determines which strategies become reachable.
The broad ordering is robust to changes in landscape complexity and the correlation between financial and social performance. The search rule remains a distinct source of firm heterogeneity.
Why it matters
Stated goals do not determine outcomes without a rule for resolving trade-offs during search. Combine and Penalize require a common scale for social and financial value; Alternate needs only within-goal comparisons. Firms must therefore choose both a desired position on the social–financial frontier and a search process capable of reaching it.
How to use this paper
Cite this for
- A multi-objective search model comparing Maximize, Combine, Alternate, Penalize, and Satisfice heuristics.
- The distinction between multi-objective decision-making over known alternatives and multi-objective search for undiscovered alternatives.
- The oblique strategy result, where alternating attention can reveal strategies that improve social performance without sacrificing financial performance relative to profit-only local search.
Useful for teaching
- Why stated objectives need an implementation rule during search.
- How two firms with similar social and financial priorities can reach different outcomes because they search differently.
- Why translating social and financial performance into a common scale is a substantive design choice.
Careful claim
In the simulations, different heuristics steer firms to different regions of the social–financial frontier; Alternate can uncover oblique strategies, but no heuristic is universally best across all objectives and conditions.
Abstract
Organizations increasingly pursue multiple objectives, yet we know little about how boundedly rational firms search for better strategies when performance is multidimensional. We use corporate social responsibility—pursuing social and financial outcomes simultaneously—as a motivating context. We distinguish multi-objective decision making (choosing among known alternatives) from multi-objective search (discovering alternatives through path-dependent local moves), and argue that preferences matter through the heuristics that implement them during search.
In a dual-landscape NK simulation, we compare five prominent heuristics: Maximize (improve financial performance only), Combine (raise the sum of financial and social performance), Alternate (pursue one goal until stuck, then switch), Penalize (maximize financial performance while deducting shortfalls below a social threshold), and Satisfice (prioritize financial performance only after meeting a social threshold). Across varying complexity, goal correlation, and thresholds, these heuristics produce systematically different trajectories and joint outcomes.
By escaping local financial optima, Alternate often discovers “oblique” strategies that match or exceed the financial performance achieved by profit-only local search while also improving social performance. Implementing the same multi-goal preferences through different search heuristics therefore steers firms toward different regions of the social–financial frontier, shaping both the compromises they reach and the opportunities they discover.
Recognition
- Winner of the 2023 Distinguished Paper Award in Nonmarket Strategy, Strategy Division, Academy of Management.