A marketing scheme for making money off innocent people : a user's manual

Firms often give away free goods with the product that they sell. Firms often give stock options to their top management and other employees. Mixing these two practices-giving stock options to consumers who buy the firm's product-, creates a deadly brew. Large numbers of consumers can be lured into buying this product, giving the entrepreneur huge profits and the consumers a growing profit share. But this is a camouflaged Ponzi that will ultimately crash. By analogy it is argued that the common practice of giving stock options to employees can be a factor behind financial crashes. -- marketing ; stock options ; financial scams ; product bundling