Is Competitive Price Bidding for Professional Services Ethical? Another View

Up until the early 1970s, most professional societies in engineering, including NSPE and ASCE, had ethical rules prohibiting competitive bidding. The U.S. Department of Justice alleged that these codes of ethics had as their purpose or effect the restriction of price competition among society members, which violated the Sherman Act. The case against NSPE went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued its decision in 1978. The Court held that these codes of ethics unfairly restrain trade by preventing customers from making price comparisons in the initial selection of an engineer, and impose the NSPE's views of the costs and benefits on the marketplace. ASCE continues to debate whether competitive bidding for professional services is ethical, which the U.S. Supreme Court says does not even comply with the law. ASCE should, in its ethical standards, strive for a code of conduct that exceeds the standard considered to be unlawful. Otherwise, ASCE will be put in the position of considering such a prohibition as ethical, but which the courts consider unlawful, meaning that ASCE's ethics do not even reach the level society places on all citizens.