Classification of the Bid/No Bid Criteria – Factor Analysis

For the construction company, tendering is the most popular way of acquiring contracts. The decision to participate in the tender needs to be made carefully, as it affects the condition of the company and is an important aspect in its quest for success. The bid/no bid decision making is a complex process involving a number of factors. The research carried out so far has mainly concerned the identification of the various kinds of influences on contractors’ bidding decisions. The researchers, on the basis of contractors’ opinions, created rank lists in an attempt to categorize the factors. In this paper the author employs factor analysis which belongs to basic methods of multi-dimensional data analysis. The paper’s aim is first to depict an output set of observed variables, that is bid/no bid factors, in terms of a smaller set of latent variables which cannot be directly observed and then to interpret the dependencies between them.