Edinburgh Napier University

  Prior studies have extensively explored factors that drive mis-selling behavior in life insurance markets, but considered little the influences of attributes of clients (particularly vulnerable clients) on unethical sales. Our study that is based on the neoclassical theory of the firm aims to investigate the relationships between attributes of life insurance clients and unethical selling behavior of salespeople. Applying the Logistic and Probit models to a sample of 41,851 observations from a Chinese life insurance company, our study finds that (1) when salespeople face less-educated clients, they are more likely to perform unethical selling; (2) male salespeople, compared to female salespeople, are more likely to make unethical selling to less-educated clients; (3) salespeople are more likely to perform unethical selling to unmarried clients compared to married clients; (4) there is no evidence that the elderly clients induce more unethical selling of salespersons. These findings enrich the literature of unethical selling of life insurance and offer some practical implications for both insurers and regulators to manage life insurance markets and control mis-selling behaviors.