Consumer rights or unethical behaviors: Exploring the impacts of retailer return policies

Hsiu-Hua Chang and Ting-Shan Yang

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2022, vol. 64, issue C

Abstract: While a product return guarantee plays an important role in reducing perceived risk, a liberal product return policy may generate a moral crisis in consumers and induce unethical post-consumption behaviors. Situational questionnaires with two return policies, liberal and rigorous, are used to investigate how such policies influence consumers' moral reasoning and fraudulent return activities. This study finds that a return policy with different attributes results in differing consumer moral recognition, moral judgment, moral intensity, and intentions toward fraudulent return. Among these constructs, evidence of a strong correlation between moral judgment and unethical returning behaviors was found. Social consensus has a greater impact on moral recognition, moral judgment, and fraudulent return intention than on the magnitude of consequences and probability of effect. These findings from consumers' moral perspectives address gaps in the literature in which most studies take the retailer point of view in examining the effects of return policy. Understanding consumers’ moral decision-making is helpful for retailers who seek to avoid consumer abuse of return policies.

Keywords: Fraudulent return; Return policy; Moral reasoning; Moral judgment; Moral intensity; Consumer behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joreco:v:64:y:2022:i:c:s0969698921003453

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2021.102779

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