My Response to Social Value in Business Models and Products ​

I am responding to Maggie's Blog.

I enjoyed reading your blog post about the interconnected relationship of business models and the social value that they promised. I do agree with you that for companies that have been prior exposed for their shady business practices like Temu, it is hard for us as consumers to believe anything that they say. In comparision to places like TenTree, which has the whole company centered around that policy.

It reminds me of a concept I learned in another class called conditional probability. Namely this scenario is a one in which we can apply Baye's Theorem. Baye's Theorem states that given two events A and B, the probability of event A occurring given event B has occurred can be found by first finding the probability of the intersection of A and B,i.e. P(A&B), by dividing the number of outcomes where both A and B occur in the same realm over all possible outcomes. Then dividing P(A&B) by the probability that B occurred. A visual of Baye's Theorem can be seen below.

With Baye's Theorem, we can attempt to mathematically prove our assumptions. Say for Temu and TenTree, we want to find P(A/B), where A is the event that they are lying about their social impact and B is the event that they have lied about their manufacturing practices.

However, in reality Temu's case and TenTree's are much more complex than this.

It isn't certain that Temu has lied about their manufactoring practices unless we count lying by omission. However there has been alot of speculation about it, but mostly sensational headlines talking about it's relation to Shein through it's Chinese origin. If we just say "since there's speculation it's more likely that Temu has lied about their manufactoring practices", however, speculation can be independent of how they manufacture, the truth of the matter is that Temu is another company mass-producing cheap products like Shein so if they were transparent or not there would be speculation. TenTree isn't under speculation, but their branding prevents people from digging into their business practices. Speculation is determined by humans, so there's all sorts of reasons why X brand is speculated.

However, with their tree planting thing, they clearly cited a reputable tree planting organization Trees For the Future, with pictures of people with the trees and Trees For the Future.