Etik olmayan tercihler için bahane mekanizması ve etik dışı davranışın nötrleştirilmesi: Hindistan'da Chor Bazaar alışveriş davranışı üzerine analiz

Often consumers go for an unethical choice like the purchase of stolen goods, and the questionable consumer behavior may lead to legal, social, moral, and psychological challenges to the decision agent. This study attempts to widen the theoretical understanding of consumer (unethical) decision-making in the black market, particularly from stolen goods markets in India, locally named as Chor Bazaars, and deep insight into the consumer choices between legitimate and non-legitimate goods. It is well noticed that consumers knowingly participate in buying stolen goods from the black market. Moreover, consumers may be fully aware of their questionable actions. This study uncovers the behavioral and psychological repercussions of ethically questionable behavior. Specifically, the study aims to investigate the central theme of perceived ethical conflict, cognitive dissonance, the guilt emotion in the consumers who purchased stolen goods, and the role of self-defensive justifications and excuses for legitimizing guilt-inducing behaviors. The present study extends the possible understanding and sophisticated explanation for consumer unethical buying behavior with consumer excuses and neutralization strategies. The study proposed a conceptual framework named Consumer Excuse Mechanism. The consumer excuse mechanism is partially inspired by the crux of neutralization theory and its techniques. The Consumer Excuse Mechanism postulates a theoretical clarification for how an individual consumer mitigates their psychological distress and how they morally overcome their feel of guilt, antecedent by questionable behavior. The study proposed a research model centered on the relationships of ethical conflict, cognitive dissonance, consumer guilt, consumer excuse & neutralization, and purchase of stolen goods. A web-based survey method is used to collect data for testing the model. Structural Equation Modeling was applied to analyze the cause-and-effect relationship in the structural model using Smart-PLS. Results suggest that the purchase of stolen goods may end up with many psychological discomforts and negative emotions, including ethical conflict, cognitive dissonance, and guilt. The study's finding confirms the moderating role of consumer excuse and neutralization on the purchase of stolen goods. It implies that the negative relationship between consumer guilt and the purchase of stolen goods will be weaker for those with high consumer excuse and neutralization. The analysis shows that buyers use excuse and neutralization as a guilt-management strategy to downplay the psychological repercussions of unethical buying behavior.