Research On The Influence Of Construction Contract Completeness On The Method Of Dispute Settlement

The characters of construction projects such as high complexity,information asymmetry,assets specificity and so on,have provided enough space for opportunism.Contract governance is an important measure to restrain opportunism.This paper empirically refines to unveil how the completeness of contract's two functions-control and coordination are related to each of two forms of opportunistic behaviors-strong and weak,and in turn,how these two forms influence the dispute resolution method in construction disputes.The arbitrators' effects are also taken into consideration.Based on the rich documentations of the cases from arbitration committee,all the disputes are settled in "Med-Arb" method and the arbitration documents are very rich in details and full of disputants' profiles.This paper divides the contents of contract into control function and coordination function,concentrates on how the contract functional completeness affects the contractor's strong or weak opportunistic behaviors,and analyzes the relationship between opportunistic behavior and dispute resolution methods.Our coding result had been checked out with Cohen,s kappa and Krippendorff's alpha to test the inter-coder reliability.The scales of this research are mainly based on the typical research which have been repeatedly quoted and inspected.At the same time,we also combine practice experience in the development of scale.All of these can be supposed to ensure the content validity of the scale.The analysis results show that control function is negatively related to strong form opportunism,whereas both forms of opportunism is reduced by coordination function.Additionally,the "stronger" the opportunism is,the more probability that disputes are solved in arbitration.In reverse,weak opportunism is generally related to mediation.The study also finds that the coordination function play a more effective role to restrain the weak opportunistic behaviors than strong.Contractor's opportunistic behaviors affect the method of dispute settlement under the context of "med-arb".The high level of opportunism makes the tendency to settle disputes by arbitration,and low level tends to choose mediation.Arbitrators' experience has a moderating effect on this relationship.In this paper,we seek to unveil how the completeness of contract's two functions-control and coordination are related to each of two forms of opportunism-strong and weak,and in turn,how these two forms influence the dispute resolution method in construction disputes.The research concludes that contract governance is an important measure can significantly restrain opportunistic behaviors through control and coordination clauses.The role of arbitrators is supposed to be paid more attention as well.