Applying Moral Foundations Theory to Examine Consumer Vulnerability: Evidence from Cash App

This study investigates how consumers' moral emotions can improve our understanding of their vulnerability in financial services from the perspective of Transformative Service Research (TSR). The study uses the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's archive of consumer complaints about Cash App, a peer-to-peer payment platform, as the empirical context. The Moral Foundation Theory, which includes five dimensions of moral concerns (care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation), was applied to assess consumer vulnerability. Two analyses were conducted: spatial and discourse analyses. Whereas spatial analysis was used to examine aggregated levels of moral emotions across different states, discourse analysis was conducted on individual consumer narratives to complement the spatial analysis. The study discusses the implications for both academia and practitioners.