Developing a Dynamic Supervision Mechanism to Improve Construction Safety Investment Supervision Efficiency in China: Theoretical Simulation of Evolutionary Game Process

Abstract

The construction industry suffers from poor safety performance caused by the joint effect of insufficient safety investment by contractors and inefficient safety supervision by the government because of the information gap between the two sides. The present study aims to put forward a new pathway to improve safety investment supervision efficiency and analyze the decision-making interactions of stakeholders under this new pathway. For this purpose, this study establishes a safety investment information system to eliminate the information gap between the government and contractors for construction projects in China and further develops a dynamic safety investment supervision mechanism based on this. Evolutionary game theory is used to describe the decision-making interactions among stakeholders under the current static supervision mechanism and the dynamic supervision mechanism proposed in this research. Moreover, system dynamics is adopted to simulate the evolutionary game process and analyze the supervision effect and equilibrium state of different supervision mechanisms. The results reveal that the proposed safety investment information system could facilitate the transition of the supervision mode from static to dynamic; the evolutionarily stable strategy does not exist in the current static penalty scenario; and the dynamic supervision mechanism that correlates penalties with contractors’ unlawful behavior probability can restrain the fluctuation of the evolutionary game model effectively and the players’ strategy choices gradually stabilize in the equilibrium state. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic supervision mechanism in improving supervision efficiency. This study not only contributes to the literature on safety supervision policy-making but also helps to improve supervision efficiency in practice.

Developing a Decision-Making Model for Construction Safety Behavior Supervision: An Evolutionary Game Theory-Based Analysis

“…Accidents in the construction industry have been a serious global issue for a long time; moreover, industrial safety is a matter of utmost significance ( Jin et al, 2020 ; Li Z. et al, 2021 ). The government, as an external constraint force, has been recognized as critical for construction safety ( Zeng and Chen, 2015 ), however, the statistics on industrial accident casualties indicate that there are still some defects in government supervision.…”

“…The government, as an external constraint force, has been recognized as critical for construction safety ( Zeng and Chen, 2015 ), however, the statistics on industrial accident casualties indicate that there are still some defects in government supervision. On the one hand, a lack of personnel and resources results in inadequate government supervision ( Cao and Du, 2018 ; Gong et al, 2021 ). On the other hand, China’s safety supervision system adopts vertical management, which entails that government supervision of construction safety is unified management and hierarchical responsibility ( Ma and Zhao, 2018 ).…”

“…To solve the problems of information attenuation and inadequate government supervision, we explored a safety supervision mode that implements the enterprise entity responsibility mechanism ( Lu, 2020 ) and third-party participation mechanism ( Zhu and Chen, 2015 ; Li X. C. et al, 2021 ) based on the government supervision. The enterprise entity responsibility mechanism means that the enterprise is the main body of responsibility for production safety, and the chief person in charge is the first person responsible for production safety, who takes the initiative to fulfill the work safety responsibility.…”

Evolutionary Game Analysis for Rent-Seeking Behavior Supervision of Major Infrastructure Projects Based on Prospect Theory

“…Due to the information asymmetry and the inconsistency of interest objectives among stakeholders, it is inevitable to occur rent-seeking behavior in project construction, making the project face many safety quality potentials (Wang et al, 2014). The interaction between the behaviors of project transaction participants is a mutual game process under bounded rationality and uncertainty, which belongs to a finite repeated game and meets the conditions of the evolutionary game (Liu et al, 2021;Gong et al, 2021). Therefore, more scholars have used evolutionary game theory to explore rent-seeking behaviors between project agents.…”

Suggestion of an Improved Evaluation Method of Construction Companies’ Industrial Accident Prevention Activities in South Korea

“…To prevent such accidents in advance, a study was conducted to reinforce the role of safety managers of suppliers with a high probability of accidents [17,18] and to explain the role of safety managers at each construction stage (client, designer, supervisor, and contractor) [19,20]. In addition, solutions incorporating state-of-the-art technologies have been proposed to mitigate against risk factors in construction projects.…”