Bid Rigging

  

Bid rigging is the illegal practice of predetermining who will win a the contract to build a project. It's a form of collusion that allows contractors to extract higher prices than they might otherwise get in a truly competitive bidding environment.

If you've ever seen The Sopranos, bid rigging comes up a lot. In that case, it works like this: supposedly rival companies get together and decide who will submit the winning bid for a contract. Instead of competing to see who can present the lowest possible price, companies predetermine a price they are looking to make. One company (say, Tony Soprano's Barone Sanitation) then submits the predetermined winning bid amount. The other companies (like Johnny Sack's Cinelli Sanitation) submit higher bids, ensuring that the "low" bid wins the contract.

The companies might take turns securing contracts that way, assuring that prices stay high (basically acting as a monopolistic cabal). Or the other companies in the scheme might receive a payoff from the company winning the bid.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is a Bear Raid?8 Views

00:00

Finance allah shmoop what is a bear raid So this

00:08

is a bear raid and this is a bear raid

00:12

And you knew you were going there Well i think

00:14

there's fraud fraud i tell you Well i think their

00:18

product just doesn't mean anything anymore Well i think that

00:23

with all those risk they're just trade me in it

00:25

too high a multiple Isn't the government going to regulate

00:29

them I thought that was a union coming in there

00:32

What are these people doing Are they rationally commenting on

00:36

honest things they actually believe are elements of the stock

00:40

No not at all In fact all of them shorted

00:43

the stock it's sixty bucks a share making the bet

00:46

that the stock would go down only now courtesy of

00:50

the wall street genius journalists being manipulated at the new

00:53

socialist times the group is spreading lies trickery and deceit

00:57

about stock prices Manipulating the market hoping to profit from

01:01

all the negative sentiment they've poured out there into the

01:05

ether making already nervous investors very nervous And it was

01:09

easy to get the journalist cooperate because well they hate

01:12

rich people Right All right Well if they covered it

01:14

thirty five that is unwound They're short position which started

01:18

at sixty bucks a share Well they'd have made twenty

01:21

five dollars a share in profits and that's totally illegal

01:25

Incidentally so is the other kind of bear raid but 00:01:29.315 --> [endTime] that we're not going there today Oh my

Up Next

Finance: What is Spread?
48 Views

What is spread (bid-ask)? The bid-ask spread compares how much a buyer will pay to how much the seller will sell for. The asking price is what the...

Finance: What is Spread To Treasuries?
3 Views

Spread to treasuries is an indication of risk associated with a given debt or bond offering.

Finance: What is Painting The Tape?
26 Views

Painting the tape is an illegal way to manipulate stock prices. And yes, it’s still illegal, even if you paint it super pretty.

Finance: What is Backdating?
5 Views

What is Backdating? Backdating just means that someone put a date on something that is before the actual date of the document. This is a pretty com...

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)