Morality x Price trade-off : what is the price of your values?

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Inês Morgado Luz
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/38429
• topic: Ethics; Consumer behavior; Price cues; Sustainability; Actor-observer; Moral actions; Consistency; Self-licensing hedonic consumption; Utilitarian consumption; Ética; Comportamento do consumidor; Preço; Sustentabilidade; Ações morais; Consistência; Auto licenciamento; Consumo hedónico; Consumo utilitário; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

This dissertation explores why consumers buy from extremely low-price vendors, and if they make ethical inferences when looking at a product’s price. Past research has shown that price is a cue for quality or sustainability, for example, but this study goes a step further in the field of ethics. To do so two studies were made where the objective was the same, but there were two main differences: one analyzed the impact of self-actor consumer behavior, and the other studied the impact of moral actions on consumer behavior. Consumers believe they are more intelligent than others, and they feel smarter while buying a cheaper product. Doing a moral action led them mainly to consistency, and not recognizing their actions as immoral but the company as so. The main finding was that consumers don’t make ethical inferences based on price, and this leaves ethical companies with a challenge on their hands: figure out what cues deliver their message in the best way. A gap is left for unethical companies to operate, since consumers aren’t still aware of their practices, and are still looking only for the best price.