Impact assessment of blockchain-enabled smart contracts on the visibility of construction payments
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Construction progress payments constitute a big portion of cash flow on projects. These payments are currently administered using monthly applications prepared by general contractors. These applications provide only an aggregate view of payments and cannot support the wide range of information needs faced by different stakeholders. As a result, firms often have partial visibility into the flow of cash and its interconnection with construction progress. Achieving visibility is particularly challenging when stakeholders need to employ a more granular look into their financial data. Blockchain-enabled smart contracts have a potential to address this visibility problem by enhancing workflows around payment processing and directly conditioning the flow of cash on the progress of work at job sites. This potential, however, has not been validated and has yet to go beyond theory. The dissertation uses comparative empirical experiments (Charrette Test Method) to draw comparisons between the visibility of state-of-practice and blockchain-enabled payment systems in a commercial construction project. The primary findings were threefold: 1) blockchain-enabled smart contracts can enhance the completeness and accuracy of information retrieved from payment systems; these metrics were respectively improved by an average 216% and 261%. The improvements in information latency, however, were not statistically significant; 2) visibility benefits of smart contracts are significantly more pronounced when firms need a more granular look into the physical scopes of work, trades compensated in payments, and the timeline of payments; and 3) in contrast to conventional payment systems, those relying on blockchain-enabled smart contracts are more likely to maintain their information completeness and information accuracy when faced with more granular information queries.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Hamledari, Hesam |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Fischer, Martin, 1960 July 11- |
| Thesis advisor | Fischer, Martin, 1960 July 11- |
| Thesis advisor | Law, K. H. (Kincho H.) |
| Thesis advisor | Lepech, Michael |
| Degree committee member | Law, K. H. (Kincho H.) |
| Degree committee member | Lepech, Michael |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Civil & Environmental Engineering Department |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Hesam Hamledari. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/bk150br7068 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Hesam Hamledari
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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