Architecture Commons^™

Review Of Unbalanced Bidding Models In Construction, David W. Cattell, Paul A. Bowen, Ammar P. Kaka

David Cattell

Unbalanced bidding describes an activity otherwise known as item price loading. It is a practice used to some extent by building contractors to determine the prices that they will allocate to the individual component items within a project. This practice takes advantage of the contractor’s opportunity to manipulate these prices without this affecting their overall bid price for a project. Three types of loading are described, namely those of “front-end loading”, “back-end loading”, and “quantity error exploitation” (otherwise known as “individual rate loading”). Several scientists have expressed an interest in this field, starting with Marvin Gates in 1959. All of …