An Empirical Investigation of Chinese Online Consumer Ethics

Abstract

In the Chinese online consuming context, this study proposes 12 hypotheses and constructs a conceptual model to investigate the relationship between ethical ideologies and unethical behaviors. The empirical results successfully supported these hypotheses and clearly explained the mechanism that the three aspects of ethical ideologies (Idealism, Relativism and Machiavellianism) influenced four typical online unethical behaviors in varying degree. And this study in the online context makes contribution to the researches with topic of unethical behaviors. Besides, this study also brings managerial suggestions for practice.