Exploring the Moral Hazard Evolutionary Mechanism for BIM Implementation in an Integrated Project Team

Integrated project delivery (IPD) is a new emerging delivery system, contributes to increase value to the owner, reduces waste and maximizes efficiency in the life cycle of projects. However, IPD system has not yet shifted from pilot-alike or particular-purposed cases to large-scale applications. The huge advantages of building information modeling (BIM) are far from being exploited, which directly leads to the delivered outcomes below expectations, thereby causing obstacles to widespread application of IPD system. The reasons impeding the successful application of BIM has been a hot topic. Previous studies suggested that moral hazard behavior is a critical inducer leading to the undesirable outcomes. However, very few studies have studied the evolution mechanism of moral hazard behavior for BIM application. To fill this knowledge gap, this study proposed a novel model, aiming to capture dynamically the interactive behavior of BIM-based strategy selections using evolutionary game theory. Five parameters of monitoring cost, proprietary cost, incentive payment, punishment and speculative benefit are extracted and defined in the proposed model. Numerical simulations are conducted with MATLAB 2016a. The simulation results showed that when incentive payment is higher than the sum of speculative benefit and proprietary cost, interactive behavior of both game players will move toward the optimal portfolio strategy. Incentive payment and punishment have negative correlations with the probability of moral hazard behavior for BIM application. Parameters of speculative benefit and proprietary cost affect positively implementation probability of moral hazard behavior of employing BIM. This study can provide theoretical and managerial implications for integrated project managers and related government department to improve implementation of BIM and IPD system, and also contribute to its sustainable development.