Corporate social responsibility (CSR) seems ever more important in the current context of globalized supply chains, especially for for-profit corporations. To cope with the increasing pressure of public concerns for socially responsible activities, garment firms are facing the decision of engaging in CSR. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the question of the CSR engagement problem in the garment supply chain (SC). Particularly, by using the system dynamics (SD) approach, we try to find conditions that would make it more profitable for SC actors to embrace CSR. With the mechanism of mutual interactions between different variables of a complex system, SD seems to us a suitable way to examine different conditions of CSR implementation in the SC. Through sensitivity and comparative analysis, we examine the influence of factors on CSR implementation of SC actors and indicate the thresholds of consumer's demand responsiveness to firms' CSR efforts level as well as other CSR-related costs so that firms may obtain higher benefits in comparison with the case where CSR is absent. Our study is also the first one to simultaneously incorporate three dimensions of CSR in one comprehensive model. Therefore, our proposed model might provide a theoretical and managerial foundation that can reinforce the consideration of CSR engagement in the SC. © 2019, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.