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 wasn't 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 haven't thought a great deal about the issue, however, when co!
             nsidering topics for this 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 ...