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William_Quixote comments on Principals, agents, negotiation, and precommitments - Less Wrong
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This is a very powerful fact about cooperates. By deligating different authorities and by hiring people with different personalities into different departments a corporate can simultaneously be th kind of cooperative entity that cooperates on a one shot prisoners dilemma and the kind of greedy entity that can credibly claim to reject anything less than an 80-20 split in it's favor in an ultimatum game.
You can transform one obviously evil entity into a functionally equivalent structure of N mini-entities with limited powers, where all the mini-entities can signal good intentions but are forbidden (by other parts and/or by the system) to act upon them.
It's as if I modified my own source code to make me completely selfish, and then said to others: "Look, I am a nice person; I really feel with you, and I honestly would like to help you... but unfortunately I cannot, because I have this stupid source code which does not allow me to act this way."
But if I did it this way, you would obviously ask me: "So if you are such a nice person, why did you modify your source code this way?"
But it works if my source code was written by someone else. People somehow don't ask: "So if you are such a nice person, and the rules are bad, why did you agree to follow such bad rules?" Somehow we treat the choice of following some else's rules as a morally neutral choice.
The excuse "I was just following orders" is pretty discredited these days.
For a Nazi before a war tribunal, yes.
For an employee who by following company orders makes the price negotiation more difficult for a customer, no.
The difference is probably based on price negotiation not being percieved as a moral problem. Thus the employee removes some of your possible utility, but he is not doing anything immoral. Following orders which are not considered immoral is still an acceptable excuse.