earticle

영어

This paper compares Korean and US college students' attitudes toward apparel consumers' misbehavior (shoplifting and immoral return), and the effects of ethical ideology on their attitude toward consumer misbehavior. Using the Oaxaca model, we sepeate the attitude diference two part: one is attitude difference caused by ethical ideology and the other is caused by other factors. 227 Korean and 193 US college students enrolled at a large university located in a metropolitan area participated in the study. Major findings were: 1) ethical ideology(idealism and relativism) significantly affected US college students' attitude toward shoplifting and immoral return behaviors; 2) idealism was negatively related to the college students' attitude toward consumer misbehavior, while relativism was positively related to it; 3) decomposition shows that there is not much difference on the attitude toward shoplifting between Korean and US students, but most of those differences were explained by students' difference on the relativism.