

Industry Report
My published industry reports that intended to provide insights and implications for the practice

Title: The Global Use of FIDIC by Chinese Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Firms
Published Time: 2024
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Abstract:
To understand the amendments made to the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC) general conditions in practice, the Global Infrastructure Project Research Centre at Tianjin University in China has collected 454 contract documents that use the FIDIC standard contracts as general conditions.
The collected contract documents cover 13 different editions of the FIDIC general conditions released from 1987 to 2017, from projects in 74 countries around the world with project dates ranging from 2004 to 2022.
This report aims to represent the collected contract data, share the coding results, and describe the amendments made to the FIDIC general conditions in practice, especially the extent and different types of amendments. Chapter 3 to Chapter 6 are used to introduce the coding results of the amendments in practice to the FIDIC 1999 Suite and 2017 Suite of Contracts. Each chapter includes an analysis of the three different levels of amendments, common types of the Level 3 Amendments, common types of additions, deletions, and contractor-favourable amendments.

Academic Publications_Journal Papers
My published journal papers that provide theoretical contributions to the current bodies of knowledge

Title: Application of large language models to intelligently analyze long construction contract texts
Published Time: 2024
Published Journal: Construction Management and Economics
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Abstract:
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has provided an opportunity to assist humans in quickly reading, searching, and understanding the contents of construction contracts.
However, the limited context length of LLMs restricts their ability to process lengthy contract documents, which hinders their application in the construction industry. This study proposes intelligent analysis methods for long construction contracts, which enables LLMs to handle contracts that exceed their context length through a two-stage text segmentation.
We further utilized the segmented text chunks for content compression and intelligent question-answering applications. The FIDIC contract was used for testing. A condensed version of lengthy contracts summarizes the provisions in a shorter format. It maintains a high level of correctness and readability, offering practitioners additional options to read contracts of varying lengths based on their needs.
The satisfaction rate of the question-answering outcomes reached 93.3%, allowing practitioners to quickly obtain specific clauses of interest and relevant contract knowledge through personalized queries. The performance of the 8K model using our methods is comparable to that of the 128K long-text models, while reducing computational power. This study expands the potential for applications of LLMs in contract management within the construction industry.

Title: Contract Violations in the Construction Projects: How Contractual Obligations are Reached Affects Contractual and Reputational Enforcement
Published Time: 2023
Published Journal: IEEE Transaction on Engineering Management
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Abstract:
Contract violations are frequent due to the high uncertainty and complexity of construction projects. However, enforcement after a violation has received limited attention.
This study distinguishes between three types of violations, i.e., letter violations, mutually agreed spirit violations, and unilaterally assumed spirit violations, based on the documentation and mutuality dimensions.
By using the data collected from Chinese general contractors, this study concludes that compared with unilaterally assumed spirit
violations, violations of high mutuality of obligations (the first two violations) will lead to more severe contractual and reputational
enforcement while with high mutuality, whether the violated obligations are written in the contract or not (corresponding to the first two violations, respectively) does not significantly affect the severity of enforcement. The mediating effects of relational risk perception on the aforementioned effects are empirically supported.
This study contributes to the enforcement literature by exploring the effects of the characteristics of violations, especially violations of undocumented elements of contracts, on enforcement and fills the gaps in the scarce literature on reputational enforcement and its antecedents. Project managers can benefit from this study by recognizing the application of reputational enforcement and making better alignment between different types of violations and enforcement.

Title: When does control curb opportunistic behaviour: evidence from the construction industry
Published Time: 2023
Published Journal: Production Planning & Control
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Abstract:
The subcontracting organizational arrangement has received limited attention in designing the control mechanism. This study has explored how managerial controls affect opportunistic behaviour and developed a contingency framework to investigate the moderating effect of subcontracting dispersion.
By using survey data from 323 general contractors in the Chinese construction industry, this study reveals that both outcome control and clan control curb the occurrence of subcontractors’ opportunistic behaviours while behaviour control scarcely helps.
Besides, subcontractor dispersion distinctively moderates these relationships. A high level of subcontractor dispersion amplifies the opportunismcurbing effect of outcome control, but attenuates that of clan control, which leads to more opportunistic behaviours. Only at a lower level of subcontractor dispersion will behaviour control mitigate subcontractors’ opportunistic behaviours.
Our configurational analyses reveal the substitute and complementary relationship between different control modes with different levels of subcontracting dispersion. This study contributes to the literature on governing opportunism and managerial control.
The findings guide managers of the general contractor to exploit appropriate managerial controls to curb opportunistic behaviours across different organizational designs.

Title: Make, buy, or ally?—A configurational approach to governance choices in vertical expansion
Published Time: 2023
Published Journal: Strategic Change
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Abstract:
Firms expand vertical boundaries by obtaining ownership of relevant resources. There are three means by which firms can achieve this goal: internal development, mergers and acquisitions (M&As), and equity joint ventures.
From transaction cost theory and resource-based view, this study analyzed how resource characteristics, environmental conditions, and firms' capabilities influence their governance choices by studying 30 cases involving architectural, engineering, and construction firms and employing a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis method.
The findings reveal that all the antecedents jointly influenced firms' governance choices; however, they did so in a way that led to the firms' rejection as opposed to the implementation of one strategy. Firms avoided choosing internal development to circumvent high internal transaction costs or expand into new business rapidly. Firms excluded M&As when the similarity between new and existing resources was high to avoid resource redundancy. When market uncertainty was high, they did so to avoid investment risks.
Moreover, when high external transaction costs were evident due to interactions and interdependency between firms and their partners, firms tended to choose a more integrated strategy and excluded equity joint ventures. The research indicates that firms' relational capabilities help them reduce external transaction costs and identify strategies with the lowest efficiency.

Title: Revisiting the Relationship Between Contract Governance and Contractors’ Opportunistic Behavior in Construction Projects
Published Time: 2022
Published Journal: IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management
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Abstract:
Contracts are crucial for curbing opportunism, a common phenomenon in construction projects. This article differentiates among the contractual mechanisms of obligatoriness, monitoring, and coordination, and studies the relationships between the complexity of the above functions and different types of opportunistic behavior.
Using data from 262 clients (i.e., the parties issuing contracts) in the Chinese construction industry, this article reveals that contractual obligatoriness has a negative effect on strong-form opportunistic behavior. At the same time, contractual monitoring and coordination have positive and negative effects, respectively, on weak-form opportunistic behavior.
Furthermore, we find that goodwill trust mediates contractual coordination’s effect on weak-form opportunistic behavior. This article contributes to both the contract management literature and the interorganizational relationship governance literature by providing more nuanced findings that speak to the debate surrounding the relationship between contractual governance and opportunistic behavior, elaborate the mediation mechanism, and provide insights into the contractual function view.

Title: Enforcement against contract violation in Chinese construction projects: impacts of trust and perceived intentionality
Published Time: 2021
Published Journal: Construction Management and Economics
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Abstract:
Violations happen frequently in construction projects due to opportunistic intentions and/or the lack of awareness of obligations and/or honest attempts to react to unforeseen circumstances. Dealing with contract violations plays an important role in managing projects.
The aim of the research is to investigate the impact of trust, analyzed in terms of the goodwill-based and competence-based trust, on both contract and social enforcement after a contract violation. A questionnaire survey, partially based on semi-structured interviews, was used for data collection. All the data is from the Chinese construction industry since it provides a fertile context to explore the research questions.
The results show that: 1) reputation is used as social enforcement in practice and the severity of it is reflected by the scope of the disclosure, 2) the two dimensions of trust have opposite influences on the severity of contract and social enforcement via different
mediating effects of perceived intentionality. Specifically, goodwill-based trust reduces the severity of enforcement via decreasing perceived intentionality, while competence-based trust increases the severity of enforcement by increasing perceived intentionality.
A comprehensive and nuanced understanding for managing contract violation is generated in this research, which will help project managers to manage the contract violation and the interfirm relationships more effectively.

Title: Mediating Role of Risk Perception of Trust and Contract Enforcement in the Construction Industry
Published Time: 2019
Published Journal: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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Abstract:
Contract violations have become common problems in construction projects, yet little of the construction contract literature addresses the question of responses to contract violations (i.e., contract enforcement). This research investigates the effects of trust on contract enforcement in a principal–agent relationship and explores the mediating role of risk perception on those effects.
The authors distributed 429 electronic questionnaires and received 280 responses. After deleting responses completed in under 100s and nonmanager responses, we narrowed the total to 253 valid responses from professionals in the Chinese construction industry.
Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to test the hypotheses in this study, and the findings revealed that goodwill-based trust diminishes the severity of contract enforcement, while perceived relational risk and perceived performance risk increase the severity of contract enforcement. Mediation analyses also support the mediating role of perceived relational risk on the effect of goodwill-based trust on contract enforcement.
The findings contribute to contract theory by providing a thorough understanding of contract enforcement and developing a conceptual framework consisting of trust, perceived risk, and contract enforcement. Managers from violating parties may benefit from this article through an understanding of the role of trust and perceived risk in dealing with a contract violation and following the strategies recommended for diminishing the severity of contract enforcement.

Title: Influence of Prior Ties on Trust in Contract Enforcement in the Construction Industry: Moderating Role of the Shadow of the Future
Published Time: 2017
Published Journal: Journal of Management in Engineering
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Abstract:
This article explores the effect of prior ties on trust in contract enforcement after contractual breaches, which is underdeveloped in the existing literature, from a multifunctional perspective.
In this research, both goodwill-based and competence-based trust have been distinguished to explore their mediating effects on the influence of prior ties on contract enforcement; two diverse functions of contracts, controlling and coordination, have been differentiated.
This study also examined the moderating effects of the shadow of the future on these functions. Using data gathered from a paper-based survey of 195 Chinese general parties in the construction industry, we posit that prior ties between contracting parties will improve the level of both goodwill-based and competence-based trust between them, thus negatively influencing the severity of contract enforcement.
Furthermore, the inhibiting effects of competence-based trust on the severity of coordination contract enforcement will be strengthened under the circumstances of a higher likelihood of continued cooperation. This study offers a deep and nuanced understanding of contract enforcement.

Academic Publications_Conference Papers and Books
My published conference papers and books