UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Four members of the Business Ethics Case Team at the Penn State Smeal College of Business collaborated to win two parts of the 2023 International Business Ethics Case Competition (IBECC) in late April.
Adam Zovko, a fourth-year finance major; Grant Reitz, a second-year corporate innovation and entrepreneurship major; Angela Lam Li, a second-year marketing major; and Kate Whyte, a third-year student in the bachelor of science/MBA program, won both the 25-minute presentation and the 10-minute presentation of the competition.
The IBECC is unique in that each team is responsible for developing its own ethical issue to address, and it is broken into three separate competitions:
- A 25-minute competition in which each team prepared a PowerPoint presentation and spoke for 25 minutes on the problem it investigated and the solutions it developed. Teams analyzed the financial, legal and ethical considerations of the problem and solution.
- A 10-minute presentation with two to three members of the team. The teams were not allowed to use a PowerPoint and were asked to speak solely on the ethical issues of their problem and solution.
- A single student takes on the role of an employee at the company they were investigating in which the student, along with several other executives from the company, were in a conference room discussing the issue, but no one had raised the ethical issues yet. The student had 90 seconds to convince their fellow employees that the issue was an ethical problem and that it should be addressed as such.
The Smeal team decided to explore Ticketmaster’s pricing tactics, specifically by addressing how the company handles its fee structures.
For its two wins, the Smeal team earned $1,300 in prize money to split among the four participants.
A total of 22 teams representing 18 universities, including, for the first time, institutions from Iran and Russia, competed.