Business Commons^™

How Do Consumers In General Evaluate, Judge, And Act Toward Shoplifting? The Moderating Effects Of Personal Characteristics And Motives, Juehui Shi, Ngoc Cindy Pham, Claudio Schapsis, Tofazzal Hossain, Arturo Z. Vasquez-Parraga

Marketing Faculty Publications and Presentations

Despite the seriousness of shoplifting, consumers’ evaluations, judgements, and intentions toward shoplifting remain underexplored by scholars from business ethics, marketing, retailing, and consumer behavior. We propose a new shoplifting ethics model, which integrates Hunt and Vitell’s theory of ethics with Nadeau, Rochlen, and Tyminski’s typology of shoplifting, by incorporating the moderators of consumers’ personal characteristics (i.e., age, gender, marital status, income) and shoplifting motives (i.e., social, experiential, economic, emotional) onto the relationships among deontological evaluation, teleological evaluation, ethical judgment, and intention. Based on a two-by-two randomized experimental design, two shoplifting cases (i.e., swapping price tags, stealing products) are investigated in …