An Empirical Study Of China’s Consumer Unethical Behavior

With the growing awareness of consumer sovereignty, scholars showed great interest in business ethics, but consumer ethicals issues have been ignored. In fact, the economic system needs buyers and sellers to maintain, any party of unethical behavior in the transaction will bring economic disorder, destruction and collapse of the system. Consumer unethical behavior such as actively benefiting from an illegal activity, actively benefiting from a questionable action, passively benefiting at the expense of others, uncivil or discourteous actions in public, drawing upon public funds or resources for personal consumption and consumer hegemony et al. harm businesses, governments, organizations and societies, undermine the trust of the community mechanism, increase the cost of transactions, hinder the rational allocation of social resources, affect the entire order of society establishment. Therefore it is very important to the prevention and control of consumer unethical behavior.Existing research in relation to consumer unethical behavior by consumers can be divided into two broad streams. The first deals with specific behaviors, the second stream of research is concerned with consumer unethical behavior more generally. The latter mainly focus on consumer ethical beliefs to study, more studies have shown that consumer ethical beliefs are found to have a positive impact on intentions of consumer ethical beliefs. But the behavior may not be influenced by the beliefs, some scholars considered intermediate factors between beliefs and behaviors. Domestic and foreign scholars of consumer unethical behavior has made some achievements, but the study focused on developed countries, not developing countries. Given that the Chinese mainland scholars have not yet used the theory of planned behavior to study a wide range of consumer unethical behavior, this as the starting point。Scenario simulation method was used to reveal key antecedents of consumer unethical behavior and explore the mechanism of the formation of consumer unethical behavior. The study found that theory of planned behavior can be used to illustrate the consumer unethical behavior, that is, when consumers hold a positive attitude, conform to social norms, and have a strong control of the behavior of consumer unethical behavior, will have a strong intentions of consumer unethical behavior, thus, consumer unethical behavior will happen; face consciousness will influence relationship of social norms and consumer unethical behavior intentions, the more face consciousness, a positive correlation between social norms and non-ethical consumer behavioral intentions will be weakened, and vice versa; chance of getting caught also influence the consumer unethical behavior, but compared to the other factors was less affected.The conclusion of the study will help decision makers take reasonable measures to reduce consumer unethical behavior to protect commercial sovereignty and social environment, improve profitability, and promote the sustainable development of society.