What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
John Jeff LaGORGA, a minor, by Joseph LaGorga, his guardian and Joseph LaGorga and Bernadette LaGorga v. The KROGER COMPANY, a corp., Defendant and third-party plaintiff, v. Sidney H. EVANS, Individually and trading and doing business as Evans Manufacturing Co., and Evans Manufacturing Company, Incorporated, third-party defendant. The Kroger Company, third-party plaintiff, Appellant.
No. 17082.
United States Court of Appeals Third Circuit.
Argued Dec. 19, 1968.
Decided March 3, 1969.
Bruce R. Martin, Pittsburgh, Pa., for appellant. •
Wallace E. Edgecombe, Royston, Robb, Leonard, Edgecombe, Miller & Shorrall, Pittsburgh, Pa., for appellee.
Before SEITZ, ALDISERT and STAHL, Circuit Judges.
OPINION OF THE COURT
PER CURIAM.
This is an appeal challenging the special verdict in a third party action and the judgment entered thereon.
In January, 1965, John Jeff LaGorga, a minor, by Joseph LaGorga, his guardian, and Joseph LaGorga and Bernadette LaGorga brought suit against the Kroger Co. to recover damages arising from injuries allegedly suffered when a jacket purchased from the Kroger Co. and worn by the minor plaintiff caught fire and burned. Kroger Company filed a third party complaint against Sidney H. Evans, individually and doing business as Evans Manufacturing Company (Evans) and against Evans Manufacturing Company, Inc. (Evans, Inc.), hereafter referred to collectively as “appellees.” In the original third party complaint, Kroger charged, inter alia, “Certain jackets identical to the one alleged by the plaintiffs to have been purchased from The Kroger Co. were purchased from and manufactured by appellees.” The third party defendants answered, and denied the charge “as stated” and more specifically averred as a first defense, that (1) Evans, Inc. had not manufactured the jacket in question; (2) Evans had sold certain jackets to the Kroger Co. and (3) Evans “has no knowledge as to whether or not the jacket allegedly worn by the minor plaintiff had been supplied to [The Kroger Co.] by [Evans].”
The Kroger Co. (appellant), in an effort to tie the third party defendants to the jacket in question, amended its complaint in October, 1965, to allege, inter alia:
“If it is established at the trial that the jacket involved was sold by The Kroger Co. * * * then said jacket was manufactured by and was purchased from Evans Manufacturing Co., also known as Evans Manufacturing Company, Incorporated, or as Sidney H. Evans, individually and trading and doing business as Evans Manufacturing Co.”
Appellees did not file an answer to the amended complaint.
At trial Kroger took the position that pursuant to Rule 8(d) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the unanswered allegation of the amended complaint amounted to an admission by the appellees that they manufactured the jacket in question. At the close of Kroger’s case, the district court, on Kroger’s motion and over appellees’ objection, admitted the admission into evidence. Immediately thereafter, counsel for the appellees announced, in his opening statement, that the appellees’ would prove that they had not manufactured the jacket worn by the minor plaintiff. Appellant unsuccessfully objected that the appellees had admitted parentage, i. e., manufacturing the jacket. At the close of the appellees’ case, on appellees’ motion, the “conditional admission” was stricken from evidence.
The jury returned a verdict against Kroger in the main suit. In the third party action, by special interrogatories, the jury found that the appellees had not manufactured the jacket worn by the minor plaintiff. Kroger moved for a new trial, which motion was denied. LaGorga v. Kroger Company, 275 F.Supp. 373, 383 (W.D.Pa., 1967).
Kroger now appeals from the special verdict in the third party action and the judgment entered thereon.
Appellant’s challenge is predicated on its contention that, as against appellant, the appellees admitted- manufacturing the jacket in question when they failed to file an appropriate response to appellant’s amended third party complaint and the district court erred in deciding to the contrary. The district court found that the allegations concerning the parentage issue in the original third party complaint and in the amended third party complaint were substantially the same. Thus, it concluded that appellees’ denial in their answer to the original complaint served equally to deny the averment in the amendment. Appellant attacks the district court’s premise of substantial similarity. The attack lacks merit.
It is true, as the appellant urges, that in the amended third party complaint appellees were charged with manufacture of the particular jacket worn by the minor plaintiff, while the original complaint merely alleged that the appellees had manufactured jackets identical to the one in question. However, appellees did not in their first defense address themselves to the failure of the original complaint to charge them with the manufacture of the jacket in question. Instead, their answer had the effect of denying that the appellees manufactured the jacket. While it would have been preferable for the appellees to respond directly to the amended complaint, in the circumstances of this case, the failure to specifically respond did not result in an admission under Rule 8(d) F.R.C.P.
Concededly, and as the district court observed, appellant could have been misled by the absence of a specific response to the amended complaint. However, any possible confusion generated in appellant’s mind by the absence of a specific response, should have been dispelled by the pretrial stipulation which appellant’s counsel signed and which antedated the trial by some 7 months.
In addition to the foregoing, the appellant’s conduct at trial belies any contention that the appellant was surprised to its prejudice when the trial of the third party action focused on the issue of parentage. To the contrary, it was the appellant who introduced the issue when it called Jack Piet, in its case in chief, for, in the words of appellant’s counsel, “ * * * the very narrow purpose of proving from whom these jackets came.” In these circumstances, accepting appellant’s contention would be to reject the well established principle that, under the federal rules pleading is a vehicle “ 'to facilitate a proper decision on the merits’ ” and not “ ‘a game of skill in which one misstep by counsel may be decisive * * * United States v. Hougham, 364 U.S. 310, 317, 81 S.Ct. 13, 18, 5 L.Ed.2d 8 (1960).
Beyond the challenge just discussed, appellant also contends that the district court erred when, at the close of all the testimony, it struck from evidence the paragraph of the amended complaint which appellant had previously introduced as an admission. Fatal to appellant’s contention is our approval of the district court’s determination that there was no admission. It is significant also that, although appellant’s counsel vigorously opposed the motion to strike, and moved for a mistrial when the district court granted the motion,' he neither asked for a continuance to produce further evidence, nor did he ask leave to reopen his case to offer additional testimony or documentary evidence at that time.
Accordingly, the judgment of the district court will be affirmed.
. The pertinent parts of the pretrial stipulation are set forth in the district court opinion. LaGorga v. Kroger, supra, p. 385, n. 24.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 1