A great body of knowledge exists on the theory of auctions and competitive bidding that is of potential relevance to construction contract tendering. Most of this, however, contains assumptions – such as perfect information – that are unlikely to be tenable in practice. The aim, therefore,...

The financial management of the construction procurement process is dependent upon on the performance of the managers involved. This paper describes an analysis of pre-tender building price forecasts (estimates) made by a Hong Kong consulting organisation for a series of 89 building projects...

Clients need to be informed in advance of their likely future financial commitments and cost implications as the design evolves. This requires the estimation of building cost based on historic cost data that is updated by a forecasted Tender Price Index (TPI), with the reliability of the...

With notably few exceptions, bidding models contain probability distributions with parameters that are assumed to be fixed, or stationary, over time. Some methods of method of testing the tenability of this assumption are examined and applied to eight datasets. Of particular interest is the...

To operate successfully, a commercial organisation must satisfy the ever-changing demands of its clients, its owners, its employees and society as a whole. To do this, it must have a good understanding of its persona as perceived by its own members and the entities it deals with. This persona,...

Neo-classical microeconomic theory has been suggested to offer (1) an appropriate analytical tool for construction price determination while, at the same time, (2) full-cost pricing is most commonly accepted pricing policy of construction firms. Paradoxically, however, both are mutually...

James? Storey Enclosure Method (JSEM), developed in 1954, is considered by many to be the most sophisticated single-rate method ever devised for early-design-stage tender price forecasts. However, the method is seldom used in practice partly because it has been superseded by multi-rate methods...

Typical measures of goodness of construction price forecasts are the mean and standard deviation, coefficient of variation and root mean square of the deviations between forecasted and actual values. This can only be valid, however, if the pain, or loss, incurred as a result of such deviations...

Many clients rely heavily on pretender price forecasts, provided by the Quantity Surveyor (QS), for their investment decisions. During the preliminary design stage, it is very common in practice for Q.S. to use historical building price data on which to base the forecast of the target project ?...

The execution of 'macro-adjustment' policies by the central government to cool down the overheated real estate market in the past few years has created an unfavourable operating environment for real estate developers in Mainland China. Developers need to rethink their business model and create a...