The Preliminary Decision-making Models And Influencing Factors For Road Transportation PPP Projects

Compared with other modes of transportation,road transportation has the advantages of wide coverage,strong adaptability,high transportation flexibility,and low transportation costs.However,along with the increasing demand for road transportation infrastructure and the continuous increase of construction costs,relying only on government policy support and limited financial capital investment cannot meet the basic needs of road transportation infrastructure,and it is difficult to guarantee the construction scale and sustainable development of road transportation projects.In order to ensure the demand,development and growth of road transportation infrastructure construction,and to implement the national investment and financing reform in transportation infrastructure construction,the Public-Private Partnership(PPP)model has been widely employed in road transportation projects.The PPP model not only builds a foundation for various social capitals to actively participate in road construction projects,but also provides critical theoretical and practical support.The effective incorporating of capital through the PPP model by government can significantly alleviate the problems caused by insufficient funds and low investment efficiency,and provide a new instrument to improve the quantity and efficiency of capital supply.In terms of comprehensively tidying up the domestic and foreign PPP literature,as well as the theoretical foundations of PPP decision-making,systematically analyzing decision-making experience of PPP projects in Western countries,and referring to the relevant policy documents issued by China government,this study investigates the framework of preliminary decision making of road transportation PPP projects in China,including Value for Money evaluation and social capital party selection,based on the multiple criteria group decision making(MCGDM)theory.In addition,this study uncovers the primary influencing factors in the preliminary decision-making process,namely,cognitive bias and policy uncertainty.In doing so,an exhaustive investigation about the preliminary decision-making for road transportation PPP projects is carried out,along with the provision of meaningful management insights and constructive policy implications.Specifically,the problem “whether to use the PPP model to replace the traditional investment and operation model” at the PPP project identification stage is explored to make better preliminary decisions.In the meanwhile,social capital partner evaluation and selection with mature conditions and outstanding capabilities is a prerequisite to ensure the smooth development of the project.Finally,several meaningful observations could be derived from the case studies.First,the preliminary decision-making of PPP projects has an important impact on the implementation of the project and the results.However,the decision makers are vulnerable to the cognitive limitations and subjective preferences,in the qualitative evaluation of Value for Money and the selection of social capital partners.As a result,it is extremely significant to establish a scientific,standardized and rationalized preliminary decision-making framework,and therefore to ensure the performance of road transportation PPP projects.The primary purpose of Value for Money evaluation is not only to judge that whether the PPP model should be employed to replace the traditional government investment and operation method in infrastructure construction or public service provision projects,for justifying the necessity of the PPP model,but also to evaluate the Value for Money implementation degree of implemented PPP projects.Based on the "Guidelines for PPP Value for Money Evaluation(Revised Draft for Comment)" issued by the Ministry of Finance of China,this research constructs an index system for the qualitative evaluation of Value for Money for road transportation projects under the PPP mode,and proposes the group decision-making models and methods for facilitating the qualitative evaluation of Value for Money.Specifically,this study firstly selects a set of experts from different fields to form an expert group,in which each expert individually provides the scores associated with basic indicators for Value for Money evaluation of relevant road transportation PPP projects;secondly,this work proposes a variety of objective weighting methods to support the experts determining the weights with respect to the basic indicators of the Value for Money evaluation of road transportation PPP projects,and then derive the individual decision-making results of each expert while considering the scores of the experts;finally,this study employs the Stochastic Multi-criteria Acceptability Analysis(SMAA)to aggregate the scores of experts,which explores the weight space and obtains the most suitable weights for each road transportation PPP project.A set of rank acceptability indices are constructed to build the holistic acceptability index(HAI),for conducting the comprehensive evaluation of the Value for Money of road transportation PPP projects.A systematic,scientific and comprehensive evaluation of the social capital partners is the cornerstone of the choice of the social capital partner in the PPP projects.In this study,the construction of the evaluation index system of the social capital partner of the road transportation PPP project and the related group decision-making models have been extensively investigated.Specifically,based on the literature review and policy analysis,a basic index system for the evaluation and selection of social capital parties in road transportation PPP projects is firstly constructed;then,the multi-attribute decision-making models and methods are proposed to facilitate the evaluation and selection of social capital partners by different experts,and therefore to obtain the ranking results of the candidate social capital partners by different experts;finally,the ranking and selection results of the various experts on the candidate social capital parties are aggregated based on the half-quadratic theory(HQ theory)to formulate an ensemble ranking among all candidate social capital partners.The analysis of key influencing factors of preliminary decision-making of PPP projects is an important adjustment variable to judge the effectiveness of preliminary decision-making of PPP projects and affects the implementation effect of PPP projects.Consider the expert decision-making context,the cognitive bias is divided into three dimensions: preconception bias,self-affirmation bias and over-optimism bias,and the influence of cognitive bias on the effectiveness of preliminary decision making is demonstrated.Additionaly,the connotation of policy uncertainty is determined and the role of policy uncertainty in the decision-making model is demonstrated by combining literature analysis and case study analysis.Through questionnaire survey and structural equation modeling(SEM),meaningful conclusions could be thereby obtained as: 1)the cognitive bias will negatively affect the decision-making effectiveness of both Value for Money evaluation and social capital party selection;2)the decision-making effectiveness of both Value for Money evaluation and social capital party will positively affect the performance of road transportation PPP projects;3)the policy uncertainty will negatively moderate the decision effectiveness of both Value for Money evaluation and social capital party selection,with respect to the performance of road transportation PPP projects.To sum up,this study puts forward relevant management insights and policy suggestions from three aspects: cognitive bias,preliminary decision-making framework of road transportation PPP projects and policy uncertainty.The primary innovations of this study are presented as follow:(1)this work proposes a preliminary decision-making framework system for road transportation PPP projects,which covers the qualitative evaluation of Value for Money(Vf M),the selection of social capital,and the key influencing factors of premilinary decision-making;(2)this study carries out the modelling,finding solution and analyzing of the qualitative evaluation of Value for Money(Vf M)for road transportation PPP projects from the perspective of group decision-making,applies the Stochastic Multi-criteria Acceptability Analysis to build holistic acceptability index to comprehensively assess the Value for Money(Vf M)for road transportation PPP projects,and validate its effectiveness with a satisfaction index;(3)this work proposes a group decision-making model for the evaluation and selection of social capital in road transportation PPP projects,in which an ensemble ranking is obtained by aggregating the expert rankings based on the half-quadratic theory,and validate its effectiveness with a consensus index and trust level;(4)this study investigates the influence of behavioral cognitive bias in the decision-making process,reveals the significance of Value for Money(Vf M)evaluation and social capital party selection on PPP project performance,explores its impact on the relationship between the effectiveness of preliminary evaluation and PPP project performance,and identifies the boundary conditions that affect the effectiveness of preliminary decision-making.