Anita Cerić

This paper explores the role of blockchain technology in reducing information asymmetry and improving trust in the context of circular construction. In the construction industry, especially when applying circular economy principles, many stakeholders suffer from lack of transparency and poor data sharing. This often causes mistrust and inefficient collaboration. Blockchain, as a decentralized and secure technology, can solve this problem by creating transparent, traceable, and immutable records of material flows, contracts, and processes. However, there is a lack of scientific evidence in understanding the blockchain’s role in building trust and reducing information asymmetry in circular construction. This study reviews recent literature where the blockchain is applied to circular construction, finds the current gaps, and proposes future directions for research on this topic. It identifies critical technical, organizational, and legal barriers while outlining a clear pathway for overcoming them. By addressing these challenges, the blockchain can evolve into a central enabler of circular, sustainable, and trustworthy construction, offering a decisive reference point for guiding adoption, standardization, and industry-wide implementation.

Risk management in infrastructure projects is important to the success of the project. The risk process consists of risk identification, risk analysis and response. The first most important first step is the identification of the risk itself. Various qualitative and quantitative methods can be used for risk analysis. The decision support system is an important tool that helps in risk management through the establishment of a database of identified risks, their analysis and responses. For the decision maker, the use of such a system is much faster to make a decision about the importance of a particular risk and influence the success of the project.

Sustainability requirements pose complex challenges for the construction industry, requiring adaptation strategies, innovative solutions, and collaboration between stakeholders to build resilient structures for the future. Nevertheless, effective collaboration between stakeholders is hindered by information asymmetry, which can produce disputes, endanger honest communication between the participants, and in the long term, negatively affect industrial productivity. To improve the sustainability of construction businesses and construction projects, there is a need for the implementation of mitigation measures for information asymmetry risks. This study presents possible mitigation measures for information asymmetry between clients and contractors in the construction industry. Mitigation measures were identified through a literature review and semi-structured interviews with industry professionals. Furthermore, a questionnaire was designed and employed to prioritize mitigation measures and explore their utility for mitigating three types of risks: adverse selection, moral hazard, and hold-up. The results of this study indicate that building trust, regular supervision and monitoring of work, thorough verification of bidders, and fair distribution of risks between the client and the contractor have the most utility in mitigating information asymmetry in construction projects. The practical contribution of this research includes defining the most useful measures to mitigate risks caused by information asymmetry. Project managers can apply the results of this research for more successful achievement of their project goals. Implementing effective risk management strategies, such as building trust between stakeholders, can help mitigate the impacts of unforeseen events and build resilience in construction projects.

The construction industry has a great impact on the environment and, more than ever, bears responsibility for achieving global sustainability goals. Despite the increasing technological development in the industry, information asymmetry between construction project participants affects communication and causes risks that have the potential to seriously harm project goals. The main objective of this systematic review is to collect and analyze existing scientific papers to summarize knowledge on the risks influenced by information asymmetry in construction projects. The established PRISMA 2020 methodology was used to collect and analyze papers from the two largest databases of scientific literature, Web of Science and Scopus. The coding rules were set up to evaluate the 94 articles that were assessed as eligible. Furthermore, the content analysis was applied with a set of coding rules and with the help of the software Mendeley. This study finds that research on risks caused by information asymmetry is still new, limited and not well connected with theoretical concepts. The most common methods used by researchers are simulation and case study. With a thematic analysis of current knowledge, this study provides a synthesis of identified risks, consequences and mitigation measures, as well as directions for future research.

Contractors are facing an increasing degree of complexity in their construction projects. Due to inadequately prepared project plans, they have been suffering significant losses during the execution of construction projects. One of the key disadvantages of such plans is that during the planning process, a construction project is mostly defined as a linear rather than a dynamic and complex process with a high degree of uncertainty. Therefore, a contractor who is in the planning phase of a construction project should consider the impact of the project characteristics on its implementation according to the elements of project complexity. In this research, we therefore first made an overview of the existing research related to the elements of project complexity. Based on the frequency of their occurrence in existing surveys, this paper singled out eight groups of complexity characteristics that contractors should be aware of during construction projects. After that, based on the frequency of occurrence in the existing surveys, fifteen elements of complexity were classified for each project complexity group. The research conducted among construction project managers identified key complexity elements of the construction project from the contractor’s perspective. Thereby, the classification of groups with the associated key elements determining the complexity of a construction project from the perspective of the contractor was performed. By properly analyzing the impact of key elements of complexity on project flow during the planning phase, contractors can be more successful when planning the project objectives to be performed.

Levees are embankments designed for passive flood protection. In order to reduce the potential of climate-induced flooding risks, it is necessary to reconstruct or upgrade the existing levees. Flood risk management aims to reduce the probability of floods and their potential adverse effects on the population, economy, and environment. This paper presents the novel application of reliability analysis for risk ranking in the Otok Virje-Brezje levee reconstruction project in the Republic of Croatia. To identify, verify and analyse key risks, a group of 35 experts, who were directly involved in the levee reconstruction project or have extensive experience in similar projects, was selected. An Analytic network process (ANP) was used for group multi criteria decision-making. Quantitative and qualitative approaches to risk analysis were combined. Different experts from the various organisations may have diverse interests and goals. The geometric mean method was chosen to reach group consensus. The resources that will be allocated to the risk responses are proportional to the risk exposures. To analyse the reliability of the group consensus-reaching method a determination of the risk ranking probability matrix is proposed by using the Monte Carlo simulation method. Different decision-making approaches are proposed for cases in which consensus is not reached with satisfactory reliability.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the Engineering Project Organization Society (EPOS) has addressed the issue of megaprojects at their annual conferences organized from 2006 to 2016. The literature analysis used in this paper is a form of content analysis. It focuses on the usage of a particular term in scientific papers. In this case, the key term is “megaprojects” or “mega-projects”. Papers in which this term appears are selected for further analysis. The findings show that the main keyword “megaproject” or “mega-project” appears 22 times in the identified papers. It appears in 10 titles and nine abstracts. Most important for this literature analysis, it appears in seven lists of keywords. Literature analysis proceeded by analyzing the associated keywords in the seven papers in which the main keyword “megaproject” or “mega-projects” can be found in the listed keywords. The analysis shows that the main associated keywords are “governance”, “complexity”, and “trust”. This research provides a view of the collective understanding of megaprojects within the EPOS community and helps to shape further research in this field. In addition, the results of this research can be seen as a step forward for scholars and practitioners to discuss and develop a new theoretical framework for better understanding of megaproject governance.

Construction industry is extremely hazardous with construction workers almost three times more likely than average to suffer a fatal accident in the workplace. Although great improvement in safety performance has been noted, in recent...

This research has evolved in four stages, the last of which is presented here. The principal-agent theory has formed the core of the research through all the stages. The relationship between the project owner and contractor was extended to include their respective project managers. The first stage was based on an exploratory survey of project managers with considerable experience in the field. It was found that the two project managers play the key role in the construction phase of a project, whereas the project owner and contractor play subsidiary roles during this phase. The second stage investigated this finding by using the Delphi method. A panel of experienced project managers selected from the exploratory survey confirmed its findings. The third stage of the research involved another exploratory survey of the same participants to establish the relative importance of a number of risk-minimization strategies in construction projects established on the basis of the principal-agent theory. It was established that trust is the most important risk-minimization strategy. The fourth and last stage involves three dimensions of project managers' experience and their impact on the project managers' ranking of risk-minimization strategies. The parameters of experience employed are years of experience in the field, the size of the largest project worked on and the number of countries worked in. Multi-attribute utility theory has been used in the last three stages of the research. It is used in the last stage to re-rank the strategies investigated previously with respect to the three dimensions of project managers' experience. The new ranking confirms the previous findings, but it also brings forth important differences between the three dimensions of experience. In particular, trust matters everywhere, whereas contractual arrangements drop in importance in large projects and across a variety of countries.