Models and Applications in the Decision Sciences: Best Papers from the 2015 Annual Conference

9. A Global Sourcing Perspective of Ethical Consumption in the United States

Robert L. Bregman, University of HoustonXiaosong (David) Peng, University of Houston

Abstract

This research evaluates linkages between the use of controversial global sourcing practices by large U.S. companies and ethical consumption in the United States. We use the Hunt–Vitell model of ethics to develop a framework of consumers’ ethical decision-making within the context of global sourcing and apply normal mixture model-based cluster analysis to data from a U.S. consumer survey to identify four separate ethical decision-making segments. We then develop structural equation models for each consumer segment and use multigroup analyses to differentiate the global sourcing ...