Identifying Fair and Unfair
Business Practices
Evan Klipple
Andrew Ouellette
Jeremy Klipple
“Bait and Switch”
 The “Bait and Switch” method offers customers something
that appears to be a good value/deal (an offer they can’t
refuse), then the business replaces the item with something
of less value or a price change.
 This method is unfair because it causes customers to buy
lower quality items when they wanted/expected to get the
higher quality one.
“Bait and Switch”
 Some consequences a business may get from using the “Bait
and Switch” method is…..
 Loss of cusomers
 Lawsuit for false advertising
 Bad company image
Price Fixing
 Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from
conduct) among competitors that raises, lowers, or stabilizes
prices or competitive terms.
 When consumers make choices about what products and
services to buy, they expect that the price has been
determined freely on the basis of supply and demand, not by
an agreement among competitors.
 When competitors agree to restrict competition, the result is
often higher prices.
Price Fixing
 Price fixing impacts the consumer negatively because it
doesn’t allow them to determine the price of the products that
they want.
 Usually if the price is too high, a consumer will go
somewhere else to buy and find it cheaper, but with price
fixing the consumer won’t be able to do that.
 Price fixing also impacts the economy in a negative way
because price fixing just throws out the rules of supply and
demand.
 The only parties that are positively affected by price fixing are
the businesses participating in the illegal activity.
“Whistle Blowers”
 A “Whistle Blower” is anyone who has and reports inside
knowledge of illegal activities occurring in an organization.
 The impact of “Whistle Blowers” is that they keep the
business community safer by reporting illegal activities such
as violation of laws, rules, and regulations.
 They will also report direct threats to the public interest such
as fraud, health, and safety violations.
Government Involvement
 All the laws a government enacts are necessary to prevent and
control deliberately unethical business practices on part of
businesses, to protect the consumers and employees from
unfair use of economic power by big companies.
 The most common way of regulating private businesses in most
of the countries is through its system of taxation and tariffs.
These are fixed by the government to support and promote
certain type of industries and business practices, and
discourage others.
 It is the government’s job to make sure that businesses are
acting fairly in all the activities they participate in.