Owner's Countermeasures to Skewed Bidding in Construction Projects: Review of Current Practices and Proposal for New Countermeasures

摘要

Skewed bidding is advocated as a contractor bidding strategy to obtain higher profit at the expense of the owner or gain competitive advantage over other bidders. Many scholars presented bid-skewing models to maximize a contractor's benefits from unbalanced bids. Excessive skewing of bids has negative impacts on the owners and the integrity of the competitive bidding process. This paper presents a multitude of counterstrategies that can be utilized by owners and bidding officials in order to mitigate adverse impacts of skewed pricing on the owner. Some of the presented measures are preventive measures and intend to deter contractors from manipulating the pricing of their bids, and the rest are remedial measures that can mitigate the impacts of imbalance in bidding on the owner. The analyzed countermeasures are categorized according to the type of bid skewing sought by the strategy. Bidding officials can adopt one or combine a number of counterstrategies that suit their needs and go along with the jurisdictions governing their bidding process. It is expected that the diversity of the discussed countermeasures will provide indispensable support to bidding officials in their endeavors to protect public interests and ensure an efficient use of the public money. The presented counterstrategies should also prove to be useful to contractors because they prevent some contractors from taking unfair competitive advantage over other contractors who follow bidding instructions and bid balanced prices.