INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BID PRICE AND CLAIMS IN PUBLIC BUILDING CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

This thesis focus on examining the relationship between bid price and claims in public construction projects in order to propose the alternative bidding strategy and help owner minimize actual completion cost and gain the best value for their construction projects. The investigation on the literature of bidding methods, claims and their relationship guided us to come up with our hypotheses on building up an equation that quantitatively expressing the reverse correlation of bid price and claims. In order to archive our goal, data from 30 public construction projects were collected, and the statistic method and data analysis are utilized. Finally the equation to estimate the amount of claim from the bid price, the engineer’s estimate, and the spread between the lowest two bids are established through regression model. Even though some limitations are remained, the results from this study strongly recommend owners to prefer a contractor that offers the lowest bid and potential claim, rather than select the contractor using the traditional process of choosing the lowest bid.M.S. in Civil Engineering, July 201