Research On Formative Mechanism And Prevention Strategies Of Colusive Behavior In Megaproject Management:from The Perspective Of Principle-agency Theory

For the past three decades,Chinese construction industry has been quickly developed.At Present,building mega infrastructure projects has become an important way to promote the increasement of GDP steadily.Moreover,building mega infrastructure projects is also useful to advance Chinese people's working stardard.While Chinese people are enjoying the success of construction industry,yet scandals such as collusion and corruption have been found more and more common during constructing mega infrastructure projects.It is accepted worldwidely that the collusion problem in mega infrastructure projects is a hard nut to crack,especially this problem is more significant in developing coutries.According to Principle-agent theory,collusion behavior in projects is a economic behavior that two or more agents who accept the collusive negotiation will cooperate together to get extra profit against the benefits of the principle.Collusion behavior is harmful to both the project and the society.More specifically,for one aspect,collusion behavior will directly decrease the project owner's normal benefit.For another aspect,agents who adopt collusion behavior usually use inferior materials and turn out substandard goods,which would lead to risks like serious quality and safy issues.In other words,collusion behavior in mega infrastructure projects presents great danger to the entire society.Accordingly,how to effectively prevent and control collusion behavior in mega infrastructure projects have become academic and theoretical problems to be solved.There are many participants in mega infrastructure projects,and the relationships between these participants are very compley.In order to analyze whether there is any potential collusion behvior,it is first and foremost to develop the principle-agent model.Recently,many scholars select principle-agent theory as the first choice to analyze the forming mechanism of the collusion behavior,and also to build the prevent mechanism.On the basis of analyzing the principle-agent relationship between project participants(including owners,designers,contrators,design supervisors,and construction supervisors),this paper use the perspective of micro behavior of the agents to understand the formation mechanism of collusion behavior in mega infrastructure projects.Furthermore,we design related mechnisms to integrate the benefit apeals of the principal and the agent to the same way.And we establish mechanisms to prevent collusion behavior to come true.Mathmatical analsis and computational experiment are employed together to study the formation mechanism and the goveranance strategy of collusion behavior in mega infrastructure projects.There are four conclusions of the thesis.First,we find the multiple agents,different procedures and the opening environment of projects have becomes factors which lead to the diverse and comple of collusion behavior.Further,these factors also lead to complex charateristics of dynamic evolusion.Accordingly,collusion behavior is a systematic problem with complexity.This means,the theory of systematic complex is the methdology to solve the collusion problems.Second,we use Game theory to build the princal-agent model for the relationship between a desiner and a design consultant at the design phrase.The results show that the disparity between income from the project owner and income from the designer will affect the desgin consultant in deciding whether to be collusion with the desginer.In this way,to prevent collusion in behavior relies on the ability of the project owner and on the mature of construction market.Therefore,it is useful to let the auditting orgnaization involing in investigating collusion behavior.Third,by analyzing the principle-agent relationship between the related units during the whole life of the large-scale construction,this paper made research on the collusion behavior mechanism mainly between contractor and supervisor using the game theory.On this basis,the paper proposed that the governance mechanism of collusion needs the third regulatory agency.Finally,this paper used the computational experiment to simulate the governance effect of collusion undertaking the different strategies.The results illustrate that censor organization can effectively reduce the contractor and its supervisor collusion by exaggerating the punishment or increasing its scrutiny.Lastly,it is not enough to adopt just pulishment mechanism after the coullsion behavior has occurred to governant collusion behavior.The prior research has shown that a fair risk allocation mechanism works well in incenting agents to give more efforts.Therefore,this paper develop an ex ante governance strategy to control collusion behavior.That is,we employed Fehr and Schmidt's inequity aversion(IA)model to design a reasonable risk allocation mechanism between the pricipal and the agent.Results show that:agents are prone to different fairness preference(in terms of envy preference and sympathy preference)depending on the value of risk-sharing ratio;agents' optimal risk investment decreases with the enhancement of IA level when the agent is envy preference;agents' optimal risk investment increases with the enhancement of IA level when agents are sympathy preference;it is beneficial for principal to allocate more risk-sharing ratio to agents as their levels of envious preference increase;the pricipal can allocate less risk-sharing ratio to agents as their levels of sympathy preference increase.