A business game with social consequences

Abstract

Conclusions: Business instructors who want to expose their students to the dilemmas facing the socially responsible firm can use appropriately designed simulations to accomplish this purpose. The Global Business Game possesses a number of avenues by which this can be accomplished. Players, in the name of company profits, are often tempted, as is the case for real-world managers, to put the firm's economic needs before the needs of society's other members. The root problems for the predicaments posed in The Global Business Game revolve around which public is more important to the firm, the perceived gain to be obtained by placing the firm first over others, the likelihood that the transgression will be caught and punished, and an inability to completely quantify and qualify the results associated with each alternative. A proper discussion and debriefing by the instructor for the cases given here can do much to highlight the breadth and depth of the issues involved which will hopefully result in ethically and morally correct behavioral guidelines for all players to follow in their business careers. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Tokyo.