Tactical Pricing

The term “predatory business practices” is an umbrella phrase that encompasses any of a varieties of actions and strategies that a business might take to improve sales and profits by harming the competition via the hampering of the free market rather than becoming more competitive themselves. Examples of such actions might include filing frivolous lawsuits to delay a competitor from releasing a product or push smaller companies into bankruptcy, purchasing majority ownership of stock to control a competing business, selling products cheaper than it costs to make them to force competitors to stop operating, and a number of other similar strategies. These activities are nearly universally discouraged on an official level, being both publicly condemned by industry leaders as well as legally outlawed by federal law and international trade organizations such as the WTO. It is in the nature of military conflicts that all involved should be predatory, providing ample opportunity to take advantage of these actions for tactical purposes. The use of predatory business practices in combat can greatly alter the amount and types of capital available as well as the source of the supply and the degree to which each side of the conflict has influence over it. While this can give great tactical advantages to the one employing such methods, in many cases they also have the potential to be illegal.