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 statistical variance of total project cost is usually estimated by means of Monte Carlo simulation on the assumption that exact analytic approaches are too difficult. This paper tests that assumption and shows that, contrary to expectations, the analytic solution is relatively...

The casual nature of employment in the construction industry makes planning human asset requirements a vague exercise. Human resource information systems (HRISs) offer a means of coping with these problems through improvements in the reliability, accuracy and accessibility of the human resources...

This paper describes an empirical study aimed at ranking prequalification criteria on the basis of perceived total benefit-cost to stakeholders. A postal questionnaire was distributed to 100 client and contractor organizations in Australia in 1997. 48 responses were analyzed for scores on 38...

This paper reports on a fully structured interview survey, using a multi-sectional questionnaire, of experienced construction contract price forecasters. The aim of the research was to investigate the relationship between the accuracy of ‘early-stage’ forecasts and experience (defined in...

For client expenditure management, risk analysis demands good estimates of the range of possible expenditures likely to occur and their probability of occurrence, while risk management is aided by reducing the range of possibilities. This paper describes the analysis of a new and updated data...

This paper is concerned with predicting the probability of tendering the lowest bid in sealed bid auctions. Four of the leading models from the bidding literature are shown to be subsumed within a general model – differing only in their method of parameter estimation. These models are then...

The paper describes a study of the way smaller builders price bills of quantities items for competitive tender. A series of interviews revealed some marked differences between normal practise and literature-based prescriptions. An experiment was conducted in which eight practising builders'...

Contractor prequalification involves the establishment of a standard for measuring and assessing the capabilities of potential tenderers. The required standard is based on a set of PreQualification Criteria (PQC) that is intended to reflect the objectives of the client and the requirements of...

This paper describes a structured methodology for modelling the information requirements of contracting firms' tender adjudication decisions. The method adopted is based on the techniques of information strategy planning and critical success factor analysis used in the development of executive...