Negotiation for Time Optimization in Construction Projects with Competitive and Social Welfare Preferences

Construction time optimization is affected greatly by the negotiation between owners and contractors, whose progress is dictated by their desire to maximize system revenues. This paper builds an agent-based model and designs an experimental scenario in which the contractor has competitive and social welfare preferences relevant to the Chinese context; we subdivide competitive preference into greed and jealousy components and subdivide social welfare preference into generosity and sympathy components. We analyze the impacts of these different contractor preferences on the revenue-sharing coefficient, negotiation success rate, and negotiation time when negotiation reaches agreement. The results show that the jealousy component of competitive preference has an important influence on improving the income of the subject, while the greed component does not significantly enhance the revenue-sharing coefficient. The sympathy component of social welfare preference does not have an influence on the revenue-sharing coefficient no matter the strength of the generosity component. Increasing the greed component of competitive preference will lead to the extension of negotiation time and, to a certain extent, to the reduction of the negotiation success rate; the sympathy component of social welfare preference does not have an influence on negotiation time no matter the strength of the generosity preference.