Relationship between Organizational Sizes and Contractors’ Risk Pricing Behaviors for Weather Risk under Different Project Values and Durations

Abstract

A problem that always annoys building employers and their consultants when drafting building contracts is whether it is more cost efficient to retain certain risks with themselves or to transfer the same to contractors, and it has long been a difficulty to accurately estimate the cost for transferring risks to the other contract party. It is a very common market practice to remove contractors’ entitlement to extension of time due to inclement weather, and in view of the significant impacts that inclement weather posed on construction progress, it would be helpful to assess the associated costs for such risk allocation exercises in order to ensure that it is a cost-effective transaction. The costs for these potential weather-caused delays are priced by contractors in their returned tenders. This risk-pricing behavior is affected by the contractor’s risk perception and risk attitude. However, merely working out contractors’ risk perception and risk attitude patterns is inadequate, as they may vary in accordance with different organizational sizes and project backgrounds. Therefore, further studies should be carried out on the implications of project information, such as project value and contract period, on different-sized contractors’ risk behaviors. In this research, a questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the weather-risk-pricing behavioral patterns of various-sized contractors under different given project scenarios. The survey revealed that the impacts of project value and contract period (and, thus, the intensity of work and scale of exposure to weather risk) were significant on contractors’ risk behaviors, and these impacts varied in accordance with different organizational sizes. The medium-sized contractors’ pricing behaviors were rather constant under different project values and contract periods, while both small and large contractors behaved differently when the intensity of work and scale of risk exposure varied. Despite the fact that contractors of various sizes behaved differently in some given scenarios, the number of days of delaying cost allowed by them in returned tenders were generally less than the actual number of days of inclement weather affecting work.