Bid Rigging

BID RIGGING CONSTITUTES a violation antitrust law. It is closely related to horizontal pricefixing, [Page 94]in that both offenses involve collusion between supposed competitors in the same market group. Horizontal price fixing is a conspiracy between businesses at the same market level to set a fixed price for their product. That price is often set well above of what the price would be if it were set in a truly competitive market.

For example, two large beverage companies have been charged several times over the years with fixing the price of soft drink syrups, as well as the price of the final soft drink product. Were the companies to have competed honestly in the market, it is likely that the price of those products would have been much lower than they were. Horizontal pricefixing is a very common offense, in part because it is very difficult to prove that a conspiracy to fix the price of a product actually has occurred.

Bid-rigging comes about in situations in which companies are required to competitively bid on contracts. Competitively bid contracts are very common in the marketplace, particularly in government and education, where agencies are generally required to accept the lowest bid for a contract. For example, schools advertise for annual contracts for milk and bread. It is not unusual for competitors in the same market place to conspire to allow one or the other to win a competitive bid in rotation.

The end result is that each of the companies will make a profit, often at a price well above that which they would have earned in a truly competitive market. The added costs resulting from the rigged bid are passed on to taxpayers, ratepayers, and consumers. An example of a major bid-rigging case was described by Gilbert Geis in his classic article (1967) about the heavy electric equipment cases of 1961. In those cases, all of the major producers of electricity-generating equipment conspired to rig the competitive bids for equipment to be sold to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) during the 1940s to 1960. Managers of the companies, such as Westinghouse and General Electric, would periodically meet to determine which company would submit the winning bid, and what price each company would bid.

The conspiracy cost TVA millions of dollars in excess of what it would have had to pay if there had not been collusion in the market place. The conspiracy collapsed when TVA received two identical bids for the same contract. TVA contacted the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, which developed criminal and civil cases against the companies and their managers. The companies pled guilty, as did a number of the managers. A few of the managers served brief jail terms, and the companies paid fines. As Geis pointed out, though, for General Electric the fines were equivalent to a person having to pay a $2 parking fine. Bid rigging, like price fixing, is hard to prove. Often, the only way that bid rigging is detected is when a bidding error is made, as in the TVA case.

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