One of the most important aspects of the construction procurement process is the management of client (owner) expenditure. 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...

One of the factors affecting the success or otherwise of the procurement process is the quality of its financial management. In many cases, particularly in the early stages of a project, this is dependent on the accuracy of forecasts of future costs. For risk management purposes, what is most...

A method for analysing the competitiveness of a consultant's two-envelope fee tendering history is proposed and illustrated in an application to one of Hong Kong's larger quantity surveying practices. Separate measures for determining consultants' fee, quality score and overall competitiveness...

A theoretical framework is proposed for determining the minimum number of bidders in competition for projects in the construction industry. This is based on the neo-classical micro-economic theory for price determination in construction and the assumption of random contractor-selection....

Multiple regression is used to construct a prediction equation relating bidder competitiveness (the dependent variable) to the independent variables of bidder, contract type and contract size. The regression model shows that differences in contractor competitiveness are greater for different...

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...