Expenditure on R&D in China's construction industry has been relatively low in comparison with many developed countries for a number of years—a situation considered to be a major barrier to the industry's competitiveness in general and unsatisfactory as regards industry development of the 31...

Performance in the construction industry is increasingly scrutinized as a result of the delays, cost overruns and poor quality of the industry's products and services. Increasingly, disputes, conflicts and mismatches of objectives among participants are contributory factors. Performance...

The Chinese construction market is composed of 31 local markets which differ from each other in various aspects such as competition intensity. Contractors moving from one market to another need to consider the competition strategies and make due response to new competition situation in order to...

In economic terminology, 'competition intensity' can be used to mirror to a certain degree the status of industrial competition in a specific market, while in the construction market, it particularly involves the part of project competition intensity (PCI). Based on a road project in China, two...

With the involvement of an increasing number of contractors in the international construction market, venturing overseas has been fraught with fierce competition and considerable uncertainties. This underscores the importance of examining the extent to which the intensity of competition (IoC)...

Design-builders play a vital role in the success of DB projects. In the construction market of the People's Republic of China, most of the design-builders, however, lack adequate competences to conduct the DB projects successfully. The objective of this study is, therefore, to identify the key...

Function analysis (FA) is considered to be at the core of value management (VM). However, research in the construction industry in the United States and Hong Kong indicates that this fundamental process is sometimes abbreviated or omitted from the VM process. In examining this situation in the...

The main task of contractors' estimators is to predict the likely costs involved in executing a future project. This is an onerous job as any errors made can undermine project success and ultimately reduce the contractors' profit margins. The inherent uncertainty of most construction work,...

Many public construction projects have been undertaken throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of the government's national development plans in the past three decades, with significant public expenditure involved. One of the critical problems concerning these projects is the frequent and...

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, is to...