Free market. It allows businesses to compete among themselves without restrictions. This encourages competitive pricing as well as provides companies an even playing ground to earn an honest success. In this sense, due to its nature of having no restrictions, a free market is governed almost entirely by ethics. But, without restrictions, businesses have the opportunity to participate in unethical actions that would result in a corrupt and faulty market. As evident in Ethan Watters' "The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan", Michael Moss' "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food", and Joseph Stiglitz's "Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society", the free market operates on the choice of ethics of businesses and therefore
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In wanting to unethically maintain its monopoly, Microsoft "offered Internet Explorer at a zero price" and pre-installed onto all machines that operated Microsoft's operating system. Microsoft brushed off the act as an ethical action to benefit its customers, when in reality Microsoft was attempting to squash out its competitor, Netscape (Stiglitz 405). In response to the growing concern about junk food's nutritional values, Jeffrey Dunn of Coca Cola advertised carrot snacks. This may seem like an ethical move, but in reality the campaign was unethically motivated by the profits involved (Moss 275). This lack of transparency of the company's true unethical motive lead to the profiteering of such baby carrot companies and is a fault in the market because the consumer's money is not going towards the snack company healthiest snack company, but rather the better advertised company. Similarly, the drug companies attempting to sell their SSRI antidepressant drugs in Japan may seem to have been motivated by the ethical want to cure depression, but in reality it was all an unethical lie in order to gain more support and profits (Watters 528). Due to the lack of transparency of many companies' advertising schemes, consumers are tricked into forfeiting their money to companies who could care less about the ethics they
In wanting to unethically maintain its monopoly, Microsoft "offered Internet Explorer at a zero price" and pre-installed onto all machines that operated Microsoft's operating system. Microsoft brushed off the act as an ethical action to benefit its customers, when in reality Microsoft was attempting to squash out its competitor, Netscape (Stiglitz 405). In response to the growing concern about junk food's nutritional values, Jeffrey Dunn of Coca Cola advertised carrot snacks. This may seem like an ethical move, but in reality the campaign was unethically motivated by the profits involved (Moss 275). This lack of transparency of the company's true unethical motive lead to the profiteering of such baby carrot companies and is a fault in the market because the consumer's money is not going towards the snack company healthiest snack company, but rather the better advertised company. Similarly, the drug companies attempting to sell their SSRI antidepressant drugs in Japan may seem to have been motivated by the ethical want to cure depression, but in reality it was all an unethical lie in order to gain more support and profits (Watters 528). Due to the lack of transparency of many companies' advertising schemes, consumers are tricked into forfeiting their money to companies who could care less about the ethics they