Professional cartels and scale fees: chiselling on the celtic fringe?

Economists have been, traditionally, highly critical of many aspects of professional self-regulation. Commentators have identified three principal instruments of self-regulators which work against the public interest: 1. restrictions on entry, 2. restrictions on fee competition, and 3. restrictions on advertising and other means of promoting a competitive process within the profession. The present paper is concerned, in particular, with empirical evidence on the effectiveness of restrictions on fee competition. It presents tests of the view widely held by policy-makers and academic commentators that the existence of a recommended scale of fees drawn up by a profession's self-regulatory body will result in such recommended fees actually being charged.