When I was in business school, one of our lecturers in our ethics class was one of the main consultants that worked the Steam project to create regional price differences and other geofencing. It was a very interesting class. The takeaway is that it can be seen as morally responsible to charge someone is a poorer country less for the same game. It is called price discrimination and it is done in many industries including air travel and pharmaceuticals. Otherwise, you would price an entire market out of a product. In many respects, the richer countries are subsidizing the poorer countries. The argument that the price should be the lowest one on the board anywhere is not realistic because a company needs to generate margins high enough to make the opportunity worthwhile otherwise it is not going to produce the product. In other words, Companies will not make a product if they are going to lose monkey selling it, but they will charge one market more to sell to another market at a loss if there is other intrinsic value like user adoption to create a community. They are selling digital content in this instance, but it still took money to make and money to distribute, so the argument that the product is easy to replicate over and over again is a moot point. Getting some money in a market versus no money is beneficial. If people pirate that games en masse by even just purchasing them VPN at a lower rate hurts the developers. I believe in some piracy under certain circumstances, such as when you truly can’t afford something when you are growing up. It is in the marketers best interest to let kids get hooked at a young age.
Wait, are you telling me that business ethics are actually a real thing? I thought somebody made that up as a meme. Every corporate executive I've ever worked for has been a borderline, if not full blown, sociopath obsessed with nothing more than getting richer at everyone else's expense. Maybe they all skipped that class?
Bold of you to assume they even went to business school.
All the big wigs I've met were "self-made millionaires" -meaning assholes that used, manipulated and fucked over enough people to reach their current positions.
I am finding that the people that are starting to rise to the top of my company are backstabbers. It wasn’t always like this, but the company keeps absorbing other companies and some of their cultures are toxic in a passive aggressive way.
I’ll tell you that the teacher was an attorney who worked for a very reputable business consulting firm to help businesses make unsavory decisions. A key takeaway from the class is that you can do anything that you can get away with and if you don’t, your competitors will. They basically said that you need to get away with it in the eyes of the law, but also your customers. They may be the ones forcing you to do the right thing. You also have to do good in the eyes of your employee culture. If your employees don’t like the direction of the company’s values, then that can prove detrimental. So, in many respects, you can be forced by external factors to act an ethical manner.
Had a similar situation with Green Supply Chain course. The takeaway was “Either you save money, or consider it PR. Nobody will do spend money for the greater good”