Panas & Ninni - Ethical Decision Making in Electronic Piracy: an Explanatory Model based on the Diffusion of Innovation Theory and Theory of Planned Behavior

Electronic piracy is a problem that has emerged during the last few years and has already reached global status. Several studies have been conducted trying to detect the factors that influence an individual’s decision to engage in the act of electronic piracy. We consider this problem from an ethical perspective using statistical analysis on a large sample of Greek university students. We examine the influence of seven factors in ethical decision making with regard to electronic piracy: attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, moral obligation, perceived equitable relationship, deterrence effect of legislation and computer deindividuation. We employ hierarchical regression analysis to show that only some of these factors influence significantly the decision making process, while we observe notable differences between males and females.