Ethics and the real sting: the stolen Coke recipes and Pepsi

Ethics story of the week would have to be the Coke-Pepsi sting.

In a nutshell three people, including an executive assistant at Coke, were busted and charged with stealing trade secrets, as well as a product sample, and trying to flog them to arch-rival pepsi. They were caught red-handed in a sting operation when undercover FBI agents, posing as Pepsi executives, pretended to go along with the deal.

In terms of ethics, the most interesting part about this story was that Pepsi had alerted Coke to what was going on, and Coke immediately called the police.

Pepsi's ethics have been praised by commentators like Time Herald-Record's Doug Cunningham.

Certainly it feels a long way from the Cola Wars.

But Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner says it might be more a matter of economics on their Freakonomics blog.

According to the Freakonomics guys, knowing Coke's secret formula was probably worth almost nothing to Pepsi and would have even resulted in them killing each other in a damaging price war and low profits.


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