Incentives at EBay to Exploit Its Golden Goose

When is it ok not to worry about a corporate board or management exploiting an institutional conflict-of-interest? I contend in another essay that the very structure of an institutional (i.e., based on the relationships of positions and/or organizations) is inherently unethical, hence even if not actively exploited. Here, I delve into factors that may reduce the likelihood of such a conflict being exploited. I suspect that most folks assume that the presence of such mitigating factors means that a particular conflict-of-interest is not, therefore, inherently unethical. This convenient assumption may be all too easy to make, given that it removes any need ethically-speaking to reorganize positions and roles in an organization and the relationships between organizations.


The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

Facebook Devours Instagram: Buying a Product

Reporters can easily get carried away in characterizing mergers and acquisitions in business.Regarding eBay buying PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Google purchasing YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and Facebook acquiring Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, expanding in the technology sector can be viewed as buying technology as a product rather than acquiring another company. Accordingly, the fact that Instagram had not earned any revenue is irrelevant. 

The full essay is at "Taking the Face Off Facebook."