Experimental study on bounded ethicality, outcome bias and supplier ethical management

Unbiased ethical judgment of an enterprise's decision maker on suppliers' behaviors is the starting point of effective supplier ethical management. However, owing to bounded ethicality, outcome bias may occur in their judgment, which will affect the supplier ethical management. Two-factor-mixed design, a method of cognitive psychology experimental research, is adopted to create three types of unethical behavior scenario with each behavior further classified into that of “positive outcome” and that of “negative outcome”. And with so designed an experiment, the influence of outcome information and the types of the behavior on the supplier ethical judgment and management is studied. An analysis of variance shows that the main effect of outcome information and the behavior type on ethical judgment and management are significant and a regression analysis indicates that the mediating effect of ethical judgment on the relationship between outcome information and ethical management is also significant.