Executives detached agency by making random chance select bid winners

Evidence

In testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly he repeatedly denied that he had any prior knowledge of the illegal activities going on about him. A frustrated, skeptical senator on the subcommittee remarked, “If you couldn’t see it, you ought to be able to smell it” (Herling, 1962). The architects of this conspiracy not only disavowed responsibility for their actions but even dissociated an agentic role in the selection of bid winners. They created a system in which the phase of the moon determined which firm won the bid in a particular competition on a given day. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1399

Categorization

• QUESTION: The moon-phase mechanism is a striking detail — did they literally use lunar tables, and did other corporate conspiracies use comparable randomizers to distribute guilt?