Trust is crucial in commercial transactions. We want to know if the people we do business with are reliable, but if we don't know them personally, how can we be so sure that we should trust the individual on the other side of the negotiating table or the shop counter? In this episode of the In-House Ethicist, John Paul Rollert takes up questions of trust in business, a matter he became attuned to after a very unpleasant trip to the dentist. He shares his story and takes an historic look at how early proponents of capitalism dealt with questions of trust. He also examines whether Yelp and other social media services have helped to solve the problem of "buyer beware" in business.

When it comes to marketing, negotiations, and salesmanship, companies seem to tolerate a lot of what we might call "little white lies." Does such permissiveness say something essential about business, or does it say more about the type of people who typically conduct it? In this episode of the In-House Ethicist, John Paul Rollert takes up the role of lying in business. He considers a classic essay on the matter from the Harvard Business Review, and explores whether there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between a little truth bending and a lot of fraud.

As children, the way our parents look at us often gives us the impression that we are the most important person in the world. Yet as we grow older, we often find that we've gone from being the center of the universe to a tiny cog in a corporate machine. In this episode of the In-House Ethicist, John Paul Rollert takes up why we often feel that companies don't care about us. As he explains, it's not personal, rather, they simply can't afford to.