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How to depict conflict characteristics? Previous literature has overwhelmingly used intensity and frequency of conflict, resulting in an incomplete understanding of conflict itself and its impacts. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper aims to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for conflict attributes.

Through a systematic and integrative literature review, this study has achieved the objectives by synthesizing the current state of knowledge on conflict and borrowing insights from event system theory.

A total of 16 conflict attributes were identified to constitute the event-oriented conceptualization of conflict, describing conflict from three dimensions – strength, time and space. Four promising areas for future conflict inquiry are proposed: linking the effectiveness of conflict to its attributes; exploring the interplay and configuration of multiple conflict attributes; progressing from variance- to process-oriented conflict theories; and developing symmetric/asymmetric views of conflict.

This paper conceptually clarifies conflict attributes from the event perspective and offers a nuanced understanding of conflict, which contributes to the current fragmented knowledge of conflict attributes. Scholars can build on this study’s findings to fill gaps and move conflict research forward. It also enhances researchers’ awareness of time and space and thus encourages more longitudinal exploration into the dynamics of conflict.

This paper aims to reveal the effects of an organisation’s bargaining power on its negotiating behaviours (including integrating, obliging, compromising, dominating and avoiding) in the context of inter-organisational conflict in construction projects and investigate how organisational power distance orientation moderates the relationship between the organisation’s bargaining power and its negotiating behaviours.

The authors conducted a questionnaire survey among practitioners in the Chinese construction industry with the final sample consisting of 219 responses. A structural equation model was used to analyse the data and test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that an organisation’s bargaining power is positively associated with dominating and integrating behaviours but negatively associated with obliging and avoiding behaviours. Additionally, bargaining power is found to be negatively associated with compromising behaviour when the organisation has a high power distance orientation. Finally, a higher degree of power distance orientation strengthens the positive effect bargaining power has on dominating behaviour.

The findings can help practitioners to predict the negotiating behaviours of a counterpart according to its bargaining power and the power distance in its organisational culture. This can then enable practitioners to adjust their strategies accordingly and steer the negotiations towards a win–win outcome.

This study applies the approach-inhibition theory of power to inter-organisational negotiations and empirically tests the relationship between an organisation’s bargaining power and its negotiating behaviours in the context of construction projects. Additionally, this study reveals that organisational power distance orientation moderates this relationship.

The understanding of how to mitigate opportunism in construction projects is still limited and conflicting. The complexity of causalities and interdependence among antecedents of opportunism (transaction characteristics and governance mechanisms) is the major obstacle to current research. This study takes a holistic perspective to explore the different combinations of conditions that lead to high opportunism and low opportunism in project management.

Through 2 phases of the interview and questionnaire survey, the 91 valid survey data were collected from the buyer–seller relationships in construction projects and analyzed by adopting fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.

A single transaction characteristic is rarely sufficient to explain opportunism, and combinations of different transaction characteristics and governance mechanisms (performance ambiguity, asset specificity, buyer's requirement certainty, informal control, and formal control) have different effects on opportunism. In the case of extremely unsatisfactory transaction characteristics, even the combination of formal and informal control cannot prevent high opportunism. The combination including low-formal control and high-asset specificity easily leads to high opportunism. Besides, performance ambiguity is a vital factor in mitigating high opportunism or achieving low opportunism.

Previous studies have always addressed the role of one or some factors independently and separately. This study is one of the first to explore the different combinations of conditions that result in high opportunism and low opportunism in project management based on transaction costs economics and agency theory.

Justice, although well developed in the organisational field, has not been given adequate attention in the area of construction project dispute negotiations. Based on previous studies, the purpose of this paper is to more elaborately discuss whether each dimension of justice (distributive, procedural and interactional) is important for negotiators to cooperate in construction project dispute negotiation and whether their impact was moderated by the completeness of construction contract.

A survey of 164 prime negotiators from different construction projects was conducted. A stepwise multiple regression was employed to test the impact of each dimension of justice, and then a moderated multiple regression model was used to test the moderating effect of contract completeness.

The results indicated that, while distributive justice is related to cooperative behaviours, the impact of procedural justice and interactional justice also have great impact, and even more significantly related to cooperative behaviours. Moreover, while contractual obligatoriness positively moderates the relationship between procedural justice and cooperative behaviours, the term specificity negatively moderates the relationship between procedural and interactional justice and cooperative behaviours.

First, the authors aimed to test the effect of justice on cooperative behaviours in construction dispute negotiations originally, but did not determine whether their relationship is mediated by any other factors. Second, contractual governance was chosen as the moderator; other factors may also influence behaviours in project dispute negotiations.

First, project dispute negotiators should not focus their attention solely on the distribution of the negotiation issues. For a cooperative approach, negotiators should also give strong consideration to whether their offers reflect procedural justice and whether their opponents are being treated fairly. Second, while contractual design may affect the frame surrounding the negotiations to help negotiators achieve an integrated outcome, they should give more attention to certain forms of justice.

In contrast to previous studies, the authors defined all three forms of justice in project dispute negotiations, and by adding all three forms of justice into the model, the authors attempted to investigate whether distributive, procedural and interactional justice were all related to cooperative behaviours in project dispute negotiations and to ascertain the extent to which each form of justice is important. Furthermore, the authors explored variations in the importance of each form of justice in negotiations under different contractual conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influencing factors of cost performance of design-bid-build (DBB) and design-build (DB) projects and comparing the differences of influencing factors between these two delivery methods.

This research identified and refined 14 influencing factors through literature review and academic expert discussions. Questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data about the influencing factors and project cost performance. Then those factors were reduced to four components by factor analysis. Logistic regression analysis is used to investigate the relationship between four principal components and project cost performance.

The results indicate that the significant influencing factors of project cost performance of DBB projects and DB projects are different. For DBB projects, owner abilities, such as owner team ability, owner experience, and owner finance, are important influencing factors causing cost overruns, while for DB projects cost performance is more sensitive to the contractor abilities, namely, contractor team ability, contractor finance, contractor experience, etc.

The results of the paper are mainly derived by quantitative research method based on the survey of 144 samples, so the results may need validation by qualitative studies. Further research could apply case study or interview to validate the findings in this research. In addition, project type and location are not considered as control variables due to the limited number of samples, future research could be conducted to investigate their relationship with project performance.

The findings of this research not only help practitioners have a better understanding of the factors influencing project cost performance, but also provide some guidelines for practitioners to pay attention to different factors to better control the cost performance within different delivery systems.

Owner ability and contractor ability are found to be of different importance in influencing cost performance of DBB and DB projects. This research extends previous research on cost management by considering different significant factors in influencing project cost performance within DBB and DB projects.

Selecting a proper project delivery system is one of the critical issues for the success of a project. This paper discusses the application of project delivery systems in China and the existing project delivery system selection methods, analyzes project objectives and indicators influencing the selection of project delivery systems, and aims at finding an appropriate method to select project delivery systems.

A survey was conducted by postal questionnaire and Multivariate Statistical Analysis was applied to analyze the project data. A robust model was developed to analyze the selection of project delivery systems.

The results of survey and analysis show that design‐bid‐build (DBB)/project management (DBB+PM), design‐build (DB)/engineering, procurement and construction (EPC)/Turnkey, multi‐stage DB/EPC and EP+C are commonly used in China. The differences between DBB and DBB+PM, and differences between DB/EPC and Turnkey in China are not significant. Weights of project objectives in each project delivery system and the ranking of indicators influencing the selection of project delivery systems are acquired.

Analysis was conducted with a robust model instead of traditional model in consideration of efficiency. This research may assist owners in Mainland China in selecting project delivery systems, improve project performance, and encourage efficiency in project delivery process.

The learning ability on critical bargaining information contributes to accelerating construction claim negotiations in the win-win situation. The purpose of this paper is to study how to apply Zeuthen strategy and Bayesian learning to simulate the dynamic bargaining process of claim negotiations with the consideration of discount factor and risk attitude.

The authors first adopted certainty equivalent method and curve fitting to build a party’s own curve utility function. Taking the opponent’s bottom line as the learning goal, the authors introduced Bayesian learning to refine former predicted linear utility function of the opponent according to every new counteroffer. Both parties’ utility functions were revised by taking discount factors into consideration. Accordingly, the authors developed a bilateral learning model in construction claim negotiations based on Zeuthen strategy.

The consistency of Zeuthen strategy and the Nash bargaining solution model guarantees the effectiveness of the bilateral learning model. Moreover, the illustrative example verifies the feasibility of this model.

As the authors developed the bilateral learning model by mathematical deduction, scholars are expected to collect empirical cases and compare actual solutions and model solutions in order to modify the model in future studies.

Negotiators could refer to this model to make offers dynamically, which is favorable for the parties to reach an agreement quickly and to avoid the escalation of claims into disputes.

The proposed model provides a supplement to the existing studies on dynamic construction claim negotiations.

Community detection of dynamic networks provides more effective information than static network community detection in the real world. The mainstream method for community detection in dynamic networks is evolutionary clustering, which uses temporal smoothness of community structures to connect snapshots of networks in adjacent time intervals. However, the error accumulation issues limit the effectiveness of evolutionary clustering. While the multi-objective evolutionary approach can solve the issue of fixed settings of the two objective function weight parameters in the evolutionary clustering framework, the traditional multi-objective evolutionary approach lacks self-adaptability.

This paper proposes a community detection algorithm that integrates evolutionary clustering and decomposition-based multi-objective optimization methods. In this approach, a benchmark correction procedure is added to the evolutionary clustering framework to prevent the division results from drifting.

Experimental results demonstrate the superior accuracy of this method compared to similar algorithms in both real and synthetic dynamic datasets.

To enhance the clustering results, adaptive variances and crossover probabilities are designed based on the relative change amounts of the subproblems decomposed by MOEA/D (A Multiobjective Optimization Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition) to dynamically adjust the focus of different evolutionary stages.

Internet marketing underground industry users refer to people who use technology means to simulate a large number of real consumer behaviors to obtain marketing activities rewards illegally, which leads to increased cost of enterprises and reduced effect of marketing. Therefore, this paper aims to construct a user risk assessment model to identify potential underground industry users to protect the interests of real consumers and reduce the marketing costs of enterprises.

Method feature extraction is based on two aspects. The first aspect is based on traditional statistical characteristics, using density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise clustering method to obtain user-dense regions. According to the total number of users in the region, the corresponding risk level of the receiving address is assigned. So that high-quality address information can be extracted. The second aspect is based on the time period during which users participate in activities, using frequent item set mining to find multiple users with similar operations within the same time period. Extract the behavior flow chart according to the user participation, so that the model can mine the deep relationship between the participating behavior and the underground industry users.

Based on the real underground industry user data set, the features of the data set are extracted by the proposed method. The features are experimentally verified by different models such as random forest, fully-connected layer network, SVM and XGBOST, and the proposed method is comprehensively evaluated. Experimental results show that in the best case, our method can improve the F1-score of traditional models by 55.37%.

This paper investigates the relative importance of static information and dynamic behavior characteristics of users in predicting underground industry users, and whether the absence of features of these categories affects the prediction results. This investigation can go a long way in aiding further research on this subject and found the features which improved the accuracy of predicting underground industry users.

This paper analyzes Fang Fang's 2020 Wuhan Diary‐Dispatches from a Quarantined City, to show how the author communicates the coronavirus crisis in Wuhan in a global information ecosystem. The success of the diary showcases how the actual health emergency has been transformed into a communication issue.

This study is exploratory and qualitative in nature. The authors conducted a thematic analysis (TA) of Wuhan Diary, in which we decided to focus on the aspects of sousveillance and solidarity. For the purposes of our paper, we used the English translation of the text by Dr. Michael Berry.

The authors focus on two major themes in their exploration of the corona crisis as a global communication issue: sousveillance and solidarity. The authors argue that the diary's ways of seeing perform a version of “sousveillance” or “undersight” in juxtaposition to surveillance or “oversight” (Mann, 2017). Fang Fang calls for solidarity as an effective measure for individuals, communities and societies to contain the pandemic and a potential misinfodemic.

Since Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wuhan Diary presents an unprecedented narrative account of life under quarantine that could function as a litmus test for other cities and countries. Fang Fang's diary provides a countermeasure to official accounts of the pandemic in Wuhan, which has resonated both with people in China and abroad.