A New Approach to Evaluating Business Ethics: An Artificial Neural Networks Application

Abstract

Stimulated by recent high-profile incidents, concerns about business ethics have increased over the last decade. In response, research has focused on developing theoretical and empirical frameworks to understand ethical decision making. So far, empirical studies have used traditional quantitative tools, such as regression or multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), in ethics research. More advanced tools are needed. In this exploratory research, a new approach to classifying, categorizing and analyzing ethical decision situations is presented. A comparative performance analysis of artificial neural networks, MDA and chance showed that artificial neural networks predict better in both training and testing phases. While some limitations of this approach were noted, in the field of business ethics, such networks are promising as an alternative to traditional analytic tools like MDA.