Towards Sustainable Urbanization: Exploring the Influence Paths of the Urban Environment on Bidders’ Collusive Willingness

Abstract

Collusive bidding is a severe unethical and illegal practice in urban construction projects. This practice has been identified as the primary inhibitor of sustainable urban development. Collusive bidding is formed and can be profoundly impacted by the urban environment. Identifying the transmission routes of the impacts of the urban environment on collusive bidding is conducive to urban governors formulating collusive governance countermeasures to create a healthy pace of urbanization. Therefore, this study adopts the bootstrap method to empirically analyze the influence paths from the urban environment to bidders’ collusive willingness. The data come from 675 collusion cases in China’s urban construction projects and city environmental data. The research concludes that the urban environment affects collusive willingness mainly through indirect pathways. The number of collusive companies is the most critical mediating variable in the indirect path. Besides, when the collusive project and leading colluder are in the same province, little indirect utility can also be transmitted through the project profitability. These findings extend the body of knowledge on collusion-related studies in urban research. The study also offers practical implications, suggesting that urban governors and owners should take countermeasures to increase the difficulty of bidders to form a collusion team, thereby inhibiting collusive bidding.

How to effectively control vertical collusion in bidding for government investment projects-Based on fsQCA method

“…For cities with a poor collusion environment, the government should strengthen its management efforts and try to reduce the tendency of social collusion and destroy the collusion environment through strong and effective control measures (such as increasing the enforcement of policies and implementing regular inspection measures); and build a social environment in which "collusion is not possible, not daring to collude, and not wanting to collude" in phases. The government should build a social environment in which people cannot, dare not, and do not want to collude [ 43 ].…”

“…Therefore, local governments should take the local market environment and project types into consideration and reasonably regulate the competition level of projects for different project types to control the collusion phenomenon. Furthermore, the government's guiding role should be fully exerted to realize the synergistic control of internal and external environments [43][44][45].…”

The Influence of Collusive Information Dissemination on Bidder’s Collusive Willingness in Urban Construction Projects

“…The world population has grown significantly and our economies have become more industrialized over the past few hundred years, and, as a result, many more people have moved into cities [1,2]. This process is known as urbanization [2,3]. As shown in the statistic, the degree of urbanization in China, the world's second-largest economy, rose from 36 percent in 2000 to around 63.89 percent in 2020 [2].…”

“…For example, Owusu et al [5] found that severe corruption behavior in the urban construction process weakened urban environmental management and increased urban susceptibility to extreme impacts of natural and human-made disasters. Wang et al [3] demonstrated that collusive bidding is the most severe and illegal behavior in urban construction projects. Widespread collusive bidding has been identified as the primary inhibitor to the health and sustainability of urban development [3].…”

“…Wang et al [3] demonstrated that collusive bidding is the most severe and illegal behavior in urban construction projects. Widespread collusive bidding has been identified as the primary inhibitor to the health and sustainability of urban development [3].…”