Influence of Project Governance on Opportunistic Behavior: Taking a Dynamic Perspective
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This study investigates the effects of contract governance (i.e., contract incompleteness and contract enforcement) on the opportunistic behaviors (with mediating roles of trust). This study is well-written and has potential to be published in the journal. Therefore, I recommend a minor revision. Here are my comments:
1. Please correct the ordering of the references.
2. Please correct Line 40 at Page 1. What is “ENREF_4”?
3. Contract governance is provided in Section 2.1. However, as authors addressed, it is broken down into 2 clusters: contract incompleteness and contract enforcement. Still, the exact meanings of these two constructs are not clearly expressed in the manuscript. I suggest adding two additional subsections: 2.1.1 Contract incompleteness and 2.1.2 Contract enforcement. Please provide more details about contract governance and contract enforcement. The following references directly focus on these aspects of contract governance: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001604 (regarding contract enforcement) and 10.1108/ECAM-11-2021-1020 (regarding contract incompleteness. Please increase the depth of the review section.
4. The authors addressed that the data was collected over a 13-month period. Please provide more details. Which months of which years?
5. Why there is no numbering at Line 276 of Page 7, before “contract completeness”?
6. Please provide references for the minimum requirements of reliability and validity check scores (such as 0.7 for factor loading, 0.5 for AVE etc.).
7. Please provide “conclusions and limitations” as a separated section.
8. Please increase the depth of the discussion by comparing your results with existing similar studies. You can add an additional sub-section in this regard. Please also refine “(1) theoretical contributions” as “6.1 Theoretical contributions”. You can continue with this structuring such as “6.2 Comparison of the findings of this study with existing studies” and “6.3 Practical implications”.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors of this article have presented an interesting study about two key points in the contract governance in the management of constructions projects, such as contract completeness (CC) and contract enforcement (CE).
Please, find below some comments and suggestion to be considered by the authors:
1.- All the references included in the last part are not following the rules defined in the Style Guide for MDPI Journals, please follow the main rule: “Title of the article. Journal Abbreviation Year, Volume”. In particular, the journal abbreviation must be follows.
2.-. The authors should clearly indicate if tables, diagrams and figures are “source own elaboration” or not. Please review all figures and tables.
3.- Author Contributions section is missed. Please, include it.
4.- The references must be numbered in order of appearance. Please, check this out.
5.- Lines 39-40: The consensus mentioned in the manuscript must be explained in detail. Also, the “_ENREF_4” must be referenced properly. Same for line 78 and “_ENREF_66”
6.- Line 45: Why the Grossman–Hart–Moore (GHM) model is mentioned as a reference for this research? Please, could you justified?
7.- Line 62: The terms “ex ante trust and ex post trust” are invented by the Authors?
8.- Section 3: If the research methods take into account the GHM model and the dynamic perspective as the two main pillars, then the GHM model shall be mentioned in the Abstract.
9.- Figure 1: There are some arrows that point to other arrows, instead of to the boxes with the key parameters of the investigation. This needs to be fixed.
10.- Lines 206,208,214,215: Please, review the references and follow up the style Guide of MDPI Journals.
11.- Table 1: What does exactly mean the fourth column (%)? % of what?
12.- Line 303 to 314: Title and content of sections 5.1 and 5.2 are repeated.
13.- Table 3: Acronyms for main dimensions (CE, CC, EAT,…) are not explained before to use them.
In general, after reading the manuscript, I recommend the authors review the content in order to include the aforementioned comments, and also to answer these following questions:
i) Why the Grossman–Hart–Moore (GHM) model is mentioned as a reference for this research?
ii) The terms “ex ante trust and ex post trust” are invented by the Authors?
I do suggest the authors to take into account my comments, and this is the reason I recommend to reconsider after major revision, due to the article has important areas for improvement above mentioned.
Author Response
Please see the attachment。
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
