Research on the Quality Control Decision-Making of the Project Owner in an Engineering Supply Chain Involving Subcontractors Under the Consideration of Early Completion Benefits

In a three-tier construction supply chain consisting of the owner, the general contractor, and subcontractors, early project completion offers the owner additional operational benefits but also introduces potential quality risks. This study develops a game-theoretic principal–agent model to investigate the owner’s optimal quality control and supervision strategies under symmetric, asymmetric, and incomplete information. The model explicitly incorporates the quality control and schedule-compression effort levels of both the general contractor and subcontractors, together with the quality supervision intensity of both the owner and the general contractor. Early completion incentives are captured through a reward-sharing mechanism tied to schedule-compression benefits. Using optimization theory and backward induction, we derive the optimal strategies of all participants under each information scenario. The results show that information asymmetry substantially undermines incentive compatibility among stakeholders and alters the owner’s optimal quality supervision level. Furthermore, appropriately designed incentive and penalty mechanisms can effectively enhance overall supply chain performance by simultaneously safeguarding construction quality and schedule-compression benefits. Numerical simulations indicate that the owner’s optimal supervision level Pa decreases as the general contractor’s quality-control level Pb increases, whereas it increases with a higher schedule-compression effort Pe1. Under the symmetric information condition, when Pb rises from 0.3 to 0.9, the owner’s supervision intensity decreases monotonically. Under incomplete information, uncertainty about subcontractor behavior forces the owner to maintain a strictly higher supervision level Pa than in the symmetric information benchmark.