An Empirical Investigation on College Students’ E-Consumer Ethics

• Main Authors: Priscilla Chen, 陳蘋嵐
• Other Authors: none
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/77214253580112883203

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 企業管理所 === 93 === The purpose of this study was to explore students’ perceptions and attitudes toward Internet aberrant behaviors and examine the differences of E-ethics across cultures. Data was collected from 365 students (most were undergraduate and graduate students) in Taiwan and other countries. It was found that most respondents spend 2 to 5 hours a day browsing the Internet. High percentage of the respondents thought “’Illegal and Questionable activities” were wrong; while lower percentage considered factors of “Human Internet Trade” and “Downloading Material” were wrong. In addition, in Machiavellianism scale, high percentage of the respondents thought people who do not completely trust others, who want to get ahead, and like to lie to others have higher degree of Machiavellianism. About scale of consumers’ attitude toward Internet, high percentage of the respondents thought they themselves like shopping over the Internet; while lower percent trust advertisements on the Internet, and think E-commerce is safe. More than five different cultures were compared in this study: Taiwan, China, U.S. & U.K., Indonesia and Malaysia, and other countries. As a whole, respondents from Southeast Asia had the highest E-ethics and China had the lowest. On the average, students in Taiwan had higher E-ethics than other respondents. Results indicated that consumers’ Machiavellianism had significant, negative relationship on their E-ethics; while their attitudes toward Internet were not significantly related with E-ethics. Furthermore, in this study, culture differences weren’t influential to consumers’ E-ethics because most respondents were from Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia where traditions and customs are similar.