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An Ethical and Legal Synthesis of Dumping: Growing Concerns in International Marketing

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Abstract

International law holds that a firm is dumping if its foreign price is either below its domestic price or below its marginal cost. Domestic firms often claim that a low-cost foreign firm is engaged in a long run strategy to destroy the domestic industry and harm domestic consumers. Dumping is a permanent feature of marketing strategies of numerous companies, and anti-dumping complaints are increasingly resorted to as a defensive instrument to stop the challengers. This article offers a synthesis of ethical and legal issues involved and relates them to marketing concerns in international operations. What is the current state of dumping legislation? What concern over personal ethics should a manager have? Using teleological and deontological philosophies of ethics the argument is made that the marketing manager who set very low prices for an international market is not behaving unethically.

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Delener, N. An Ethical and Legal Synthesis of Dumping: Growing Concerns in International Marketing. Journal of Business Ethics 17, 1747–1753 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006096208553

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