While there is considerable theoretical and empirical research in the marketing ethics literature, a major void exists in the examination and understanding of consumers' perceptions of unethical behavior. / The purpose of this study is to examine consumers' perceptions of unethical market behavior, investigate the perceived relationships among unethical marketing actions, and model the underlying structure of these perceptions. / To develop formal representations of how consumers cognitively structure their views of marketing ethics, a sample of 467 adult consumers responded to a multi-task, multi-method survey approach using three types of consumer response (judgments of similarity, conditional predictions, and ratings on evaluative dimensions) fitted to three types of models (tree structures, taxonomies, and dimensional space). / The results show that dimensional evaluations appear to have the most promise for identifying and understanding consumers' perceptions of unethical marketing actions. Furthermore, tree models and multidimensional scaling provide the best understanding of the underlying dimensions that establish the degree of similarity between pairs of unethical marketing actions. / The key implications from this study are that consumers use dimensional evaluation judgments rather than comparative tasks to evaluate the ethicality of marketing actions and that at least some of the underlying dimensions consumers use to evaluate the ethicality are clearly recognizable. Consumers appear to use several global dimensions, identified in this research as the degree of avoidability by the consumer, honesty, and maliciousness, as well as several lesser dimensions, identified as tangibility of effect and degree of effect. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-02, Section: A, page: 0599. / Major Professor: J. Dennis Cradit. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76841 |
| Contributors | Hansen, Randall Scott., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 240 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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