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This paper presents results of an empirical investigation involving private construction clients in Malaysia, which seeks to establish appropriate tender evaluation criteria and weightings for a risk-oriented tender evaluation system.

At the initial stage of this study, a list of significant risks is identified and gathered through literature review. These risks are then mapped onto tender evaluation criteria. Following this, the identified risks and their mappings are validated through a questionnaire survey to determine appropriate criteria for tender evaluation. Weightings for the selected evaluation criteria are established through an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) group decision-making (GDM) method.

In practice, different lists of criteria, covering tender's technical capability and financial performance, are often used by different client organisations. However, there is a paucity of research behind the selection of these criteria and the weighting being attributed to different criteria.

This study provides an important and a valuable insight into the actual criteria used during tender evaluation practice based on an analysis of documentary evidence. Both current practice and existing tender evaluation studies failed to address the risk element adequately. There is a lack of an explicit link between evaluation criteria and project risks. This study fills this knowledge gap by identifying tender evaluation criteria through reviewing criteria used in practice and examining their links to risk factors.

In Turkish public procurement practice of construction works, only bidders whose capabilities on each qualification criteria meet prescribed thresholds are taken into evaluation; however, final evaluation disregards contribution of contractor’s abilities to the delivery of project. The purpose of this study is to assign reasonable weights to qualification criteria stated in Public Procurement Law applicable for work contracts by the method of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with crisp and fuzzy numbers and evaluate the results. Having optimum quality structures to obtain value for money and giving weight to environmental concern in tender evaluation stage can assist sustainable economy.

To introduce qualifications of tenderers to evaluation process, a survey was conducted among 20 public procurement specialists at Public Procurement Authority of Turkey. AHP and fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) methods were used to obtain the weights for qualifications.

In any method used in the study, experience became the most important criterion after bid price. Facility, machine and equipment criterion became the second and annual turnover criterion became the third most important criterion.

The set of qualification criteria used in this study is confined by Turkish Public Procurement Law and secondary regulations. However, as Public Procurement Law is in accordance with European Union directives, the conclusions of the study should not be considered to be geographically limited by the borders of Turkey. Also, professional to take part in the survey were randomly selected from the Public Procurement Specialist working at Public Procurement Authority.

The outcomes of the study may improve sustainability through public procurement.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study offering weights for tenderer’s qualifications to be used in a multi-criteria decision-making process for contractor selection in public work procurement process in Turkey.

The ‘lowest‐price wins’ philosophy has been a consistent theme of contractor selection over the years. To comprehensively elucidate this selection preference and compare it with the use of a multi‐criteria selection (MCS) approach in the tenderer evaluation process, this paper investigates MCS tender price selection preferences. That is, project‐specific criteria (PSC) and lowest‐price wins selection practices of UK construction clients, in both building and civil engineering works at in detail via results of the empirical survey. The investigation provides further insight into the evaluation of contractors' attributes (i.e. PSC). Levels of importance assigned (LIA) for each criterion were analysed (i.e. quantitative analysis of the differences in opinions and, variance amongst the respondents) in a multivariate statistical method. Importance attached by construction clients to the ‘lowest‐price wins’ philosophy is also presented. Contrast was made between the MCS approach and the ‘lowest‐price wins’ option amongst the surveyed construction clients. It was found that increased awareness of the use of PSC prevailed amongst the survey construction clients. This indicated that cost has to be tempered with the evaluation of PSC and the attempt of construction clients searching for a new evaluation paradigm (i.e. adoption of MCS approach rather than basing on the lowest‐price wins alone).

The study objective was to understand if uniformity of approach exists in evaluation methods of public food tender for schools at national and local level. This purpose was divided into three sub-objectives: (1) to extract the main criteria, (2) to document the synthesizing findings process and (3) to prioritize the different decision-making alternatives through pairwise comparisons.

To achieve the sub-objectives (1) and (2), a content analysis of the Italian food tenders was carried out. Analytic hierarchy process was used to evaluate and compare the importance of various food tender evaluation criteria (3). The inclusion criteria were: cities' selection; metro area population; population density; duration of the contract; years.

Six public food tenders were analyzed. The first one concerned the National legislation guidelines. The remaining five food tenders were categorized according to the city investigated. Four macro-categories (Food quality; Sustainability; Resources; Ancillary services) were classified. AHP revealed that “Food quality” and “Resources” categories have greater importance in the evaluation phase of almost all cities investigated.

This study in-depth analyzes each criterion used to evaluate public food tenders, providing a new methodological framework for assigning scores to clusters of criteria. Since the literature search did not reveal any previous study on a quantitative evaluation of elements such as short supply chain, organic food and environmental impacts on public food tenders, this research delivers interesting results and fills this knowledge gap.

Socially responsible procurement is increasingly attracting public attention, but little is known about the use of social requirements in public procurement process in developing countries. This study explores the use of social criteria in public procurement in Nigeria. Data was collected from two websites being used for advertising public sector contract opportunities in Nigeria and by means of a questionnaire. Results show that public procurement is mostly used to promote a range of government policies and programmes. Based on the findings from this study, it cannot be concluded that a milestone has been reached in the use of public procurement to drive social benefits in Nigeria. The extent to which the findings of this study could be generalised is limited, because the findings are based on analysis of tender documents and a smallsized convenience sample of public procurement experts. A larger sample size may lead to improved accuracy or dissimilar results. Nevertheless, the research offers some baseline data against which future studies on social procurement can be conducted and evaluated.

In many countries, public procurement of goods, services and works is required to serve wider social purposes apart from the needs of the user agencies (which may be referred to as social responsibility procurement). In recent years, reforms have been implemented in the countries of East Asia to promote social responsibility procurement. They have entailed four main types of social responsibility: (a) supporting small and medium enterprises; (b) creating opportunities for small or start up venture firms; (c) fostering environmental sustainability through green purchasing, and environmentally sustainable construction (in the case of public works); (d) promoting work safety in site management in public works. The paper will examine the reforms in the countries of the region under which various preferential arrangements have been implemented to meet these objectives. It will consider why the reforms were adopted and also the differences between the countries of the region in the priority given to each of the reforms.

This paper aims to provide useful information and suggestions for future improvement in relation to China's construction industry and market. With China's rapid economical development and its entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO), much attention has been paid to the China construction business opportunities. However, not much information is available on the history, practices and business cultures of the Chinese construction industry.

Through literature review and interviews with industry professionals, this paper discusses the Chinese construction industry in terms of its market and management practice with a focus on tendering processes, contract management, project on‐site supervision and occupational health and safety (OHS) issues. It also discusses the challenges that face the Chinese construction industry.

China has gone over a long way in construction tendering, contract management and OHS. Its current practice is in the right direction. However, further development and improvements are necessary.

This paper provides useful information to Chinese construction personnel for future improvement. This paper also provides useful information to overseas companies who are planning to enter China's construction market in the near future.

This article critically examines the policy objectives underlying Kenyaʼs public procurement system, as set out in the countryʼs Public Procurement and Disposal Act, 2005 (“the Procurement Act” or “the Act”). The drafters of the Act made subtle but significant deviations from the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services (“the Model Procurement Law”).2 Due to the deviations, there are many serious conflicts within the Act, and between the Act and other Kenyan laws. Accordingly, there is need for a comprehensive review of the Procurement Act.

Early involvement of the construction team is increasingly utilized in demanding projects to incorporate versatile expertise in their planning. For public owners this is a challenge since they are obliged to use competitive, transparent team selection based on the ‘most economically advantageous’ criterion which ensures that both price and quality viewpoints are taken into account. In the case of early involvement, the price component naturally does not include the total price, but may consist only of the fee-percentages of competing service providers. This study examines such a selection situation in project alliancing in the European context and seeks to find a way to integrate the fee component in a multi-criteria selection system and determine reasonable fees for different levels of capabilities. The study builds on the performance difference between different capabilities, derived from a survey of practitioners, and determines an indifference curve arithmetically for the planning of a selection method. The influence of the owner‘s risk attitude and risk premiums are also considered exploratively based on the pricing methods of the theory of finance.

The purpose of the paper is to the identify risk factors, which affect oil and gas construction projects in Vietnam and derive risk responses.

Questionnaire survey was conducted with the involvement of project executives of PetroVietnam and statistical analysis was carried out in order to identify the major project risks. Subsequently, mitigating measures were derived using informal interviews with the various levels of management of PetroVietnam.

Bureaucratic government system and long project approval procedures, poor design, incompetence of project team, inadequate tendering practices, and late internal approval processes from the owner were identified as major risks. The executives suggested various strategies to mitigate the identified risks. Reforming the government system, effective partnership with foreign collaborators, training project executives, implementing contractor evaluation using multiple criteria decision‐making technique, and enhancing authorities of project people were suggested as viable approaches.

The improvement measures as derived in this study would improve chances of project success in the oil and gas industry in Vietnam.

There are several risk management studies on managing projects in developing countries. However, as risk factors vary considerably across industry and countries, the study of risk management for successful projects in the oil and gas industry in Vietnam is unique and has tremendous importance for effective project management.