The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, 5th Edition

Chapter 13Ethics and the Law

Understanding the Constraints on Pricing

When making pricing decisions, the successful strategist must consider not only what is profitable, but also what will be perceived as ethical and legal. Unfortunately, good advice on both of these issues is all too often unavailable or misleading. Attorneys who do not specialize in antitrust law tend to be overly conservative—advising against activities that are only sometimes illegal or that could trigger an investigation. In fact, benign changes in questionable pricing policies are often all that is necessary to make them both profitable and defensible. On the other hand, product and sales managers eager to achieve quarterly objectives will sometimes fail to consider these ...