C&PM academics win RICS funding for research on BIM and collaborative working
11 November 2014
Professor Michelle Baddeley and Dr Chen-Yu Chang from The Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management have won funding from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Research Trust.
The grant will fund research on Building Information Modelling (BIM) and collaborative working, where insights from behavioural economics and incentive theory will be used to explore the motivation to participate. The research will focus, in particular, on lower tiers of supply chains where small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are strongly represented.
The project brings together Dr Chang's expertise in construction economics and BIM with Professor Baddeley's expertise in behavioural economics, information economics and game theory - applied in particular to the study of social influence.
They will build on research already underway in collaboration with the Infrastructure Client Group, which explores information problems and behavioural bias in infrastructure supply chains. This research has identified ways that poor information and opportunistic use of informational advantages can inflate transaction costs and damage supply-chain efficiency, particularly at lower tiers of the supply chain. It has also identified ways in which trust and co-operation can overcome problems of opportunism and short-termism, particularly within SMEs.
The generous funding from RICS will enable Professor Baddeley and Dr Chang to conduct a more comprehensive study, covering a larger and more representative sample of SMEs and other firms. They will write-up their research findings in a RICS Research Report, due for publication in early 2015.
For more information, email Professor Michelle Baddeley or Dr Chen-Yu Chang