Abstract: There are often huge risk events existing in the construction of major projects. Insurance has become an important management tool to deal with the risks. The insurance company that has undertaken the insurance contract become the main stakeholder of risk loss with the owner. Mega projects often have the characteristics of large investment scale, high technical complexity, few similar cases, and open environment. For insurance institutions, general business of construction insurancecan achieve a stable operation by taking sufficient insurance policies and analysis based on big data, and these methods are not applicable or have poor effects on mega project insurance.Considering that insurance companies have strong willingness to participate in on-site risk management, an incentive model of the owner and contractor with the intervention of insurance company based on the principal-agent theory is established, and discusses the strategies and utilities of the participants under the two modes of common agency and exclusive agency. In this incentive mechanism, both the owner and the insurance institution are the roles of the principal and the contractor is the role of the agent. The effectiveness of the contractor’s risk efforts includes both social and economic benefits for the owner, but only economic benefits for insurance institutions. In risk management, there are inconsistencies in the interests of contractors and owners and insurance institutions. Contractors always want to pay less effort or opportunistic ways to obtain greater benefits, and owners and insurance institutions always want contractors can invest more risk management effort.The results show that under the common agency mode, the insurance company achieves active risk management, the utilities of the owner and insurance company are improved, and the owner provides a higher incentive coefficient than the exclusive agency model. The contractor adoptes more active risk management efforts under the common agency model, and its opportunistic behavior is suppressed. The optimal incentive coefficient of the owner is affected by the characteristics of the owner, contractor and the uncertainty of the external environment.

Key words: mega project insurance; risk management; opportunistic behavior; incentive mechanism