Ehics of Bid Shopping Essay Example

Ehics of Bid Shopping Essay When I began thinking of possible topics for my philosophy paper, I was looking for a topic that was interesting to me, relevant to my field of study, and also pertained to philosophy and worldviews.I am Construction Management major and, through Estimating I last year, I was introduced to a concept called bid shopping.We briefly discussed the practice of bid shopping and why it was wrong.The only reason that I could gather from my professor for bid shopping being considered wrong was that it was an assumed law that all estimators went by.Well, that wasnt enough of a reason for me so I questioned weather or not bid shopping was wrong or not; I was then accused of being unethical by my peers and my professor.On the contrary, I am a very ethical person, I just am not the type to accept something just because that is the way its always been done or because of some assumed law.Since that day in class I havent thought a great deal about the issue, however, when co! nsidering topics for th is paper, I decided that I would like to dig deeper into this issue so that I would have a good understanding of others viewpoints and then be able to form my own intelligent views on bid shopping. Lets back up for a minute; before deciding if bid shopping is ethical or not, we need a clear understanding of what it is and when it occurs.First, a little bit of estimating background is necessary.When an owner decides to build a building, he opens the building responsibilities up for bid.A general contractor then looks at the plans and specifications for the building and begins to form a bid or price to build the structure.In almost all cases, the general contractor will sub-out portions of the work to sub-contractors.These subcontractors will submit a bid to the general contractor for their portion of the work.The general contractor will then take all of the individual sub-contractor bids as well as his/her own bids and