Construction Transaction Costs in a Developing Economy: The Nigerian Construction Perspective

The execution of construction projects involves cost other than that of production, erecting and putting in place structures; usually this is as a result of economic exchange. Optimization of construction project transaction cost is a much desired eventuality mostly on the part of owners of construction projects. Hence, construction project transaction cost is a vital anchorage in the deliberations of project success. This study sets out to examine the influencing factors of construction project transaction costs with Lagos state, Nigeria as the research area. Responses were gotten from construction professionals through the use of questionnaire survey with three hundred and thirty-seven distributed and two hundred and sixty-four retrieved and was fit for analysis. Mean Item Score, ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis and Student Newman Kaul (SNK) Post-Hoc Test were adopted for analysis of obtained data. Findings from the study revealed that the major influencing factors of construction project transaction costs are Leadership, Quality of decision making and Competition between bidders. Equally, factor analysis revealed four underlying constructs which are Client’s behavioral traits, Contractor’s behavioral traits, Managerial skills and Project characteristics. The hypothesis of the study was subjected to a test; the result revealed that there is a significant difference in professionals’ perceived influencing factors of construction project transaction costs. The study concluded by asserting the need for collaborators of construction project execution to as a matter of necessity ensure that actions and inactions depicted through the course of administering construction projects should be geared towards the optimization of transaction costs.