Unethical Business Research Practices What Unethical Research
The antitrust case brought by Wal-Mart and other retailers against Visa and MasterCard in the U.S. Eastern District court, was settled in 2003 for $3 billion and primarily involved a dispute concerning the efficient pricing of access to payment information, including security data that confirmed or refuted the transactional identities of cardholders. In their pleadings, Wal-Mart and other class action litigants argued that third-party providers such as Visa and MasterCard required them to accept both debit and credit cards issued by MasterCard but the interchange fees were higher for debit cards. In sum, the suit filed by Wal-Mart and other large retailers claimed that Visa and MasterCard required all merchants who accept their credit cards to also accept their signature debit cards [which] constitutes an illegal tie-in in violation of antitrust law. In their responsive pleadings, the defendants maintained that the plaintiffs' argument failed to satisfy the definition of tying because their so-called "honor-all-cards agreement" with merchants did not preclude them from steering their customers toward PIN-based debit transactions with their concomitant lower merchant fees. In reality, though, the case focused on the fundamental right of the class action litigants to timely and accurate research information, an issue that forms the basis of this project.
Flat (2006), Thomas Friedman Describes the New
In his book The World is Flat (2006), Thomas Friedman describes the new global capitalist economy and how it has affected the United States, as well as the type of skills and education that will be most in demand in the 21st Century. Even white-collar workers, managers and engineers have been doing poorly because of globalization, while unskilled and semiskilled blue-collar workers have been devastated. Construction and manufacturing workers with only a high school education have been losing ground in wealth and incomes to the elites for the last thirty years. This era has been far better for the creative and imaginative designers of new technologies than those performing routine tasks. For the last ten years, the majority of Americans were surviving through inflated credit, mortgage and asset bubbles, but when these collapsed in 2008-09 their true economic situation became stark.