CONSTRUCTION PRICE FORMATION: A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Past theories on construction price formation have been shown to be inadequate in terms of their ability to represent real-life industry practice and price formation predictability. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework on construction price formation that integrates four theories within the domains of marketing, learning, resource management and economics. These are: (i) marketing pricing theory; (ii) experiential and organisational learning theory; (iii) resourced based theory and (iv) microeconomic theory. Utilising pricing theory from marketing, a foundation is able to be created for the procedure of construction price formation, namely: (i) identifying the objectives; (ii) assessing the tendering environment; and (iii) formation of the price. However, understanding contractors' decision making process in tender pricing as such can be attributed to theories of experiential learning and consequently organisational learning. It is argued that contractors do learn from past experience and history and are able to adapt to different market conditions. In formation of the price, neoclassical microeconomics is able to provide additional insight in terms of the supply and demand model and consideration of the market conditions. Interrelated with the microeconomic concept of scarcity, we appreciate that contractors do have limited resources that affect their tender pricing decisions and resource based theory is used to substantiate this. Integrating the various theories as a unity allows the broader reality to be visualised and add to our theoretical understanding of construction price formation.