Study On The Stakeholders Of Public Price Hearings In China With The Theory Of Games

Along with the development of market economy, the social democratization process is continuously deepening, which puts forward new requirements for our government in the form of public utilities price formulation. In order to adapt to this change, the public price hearing system was introduced into the government price decision in the late1990s, with the aim to collect opinions from different related stakeholders. Price hearing is gradually becoming an important strategy for the public sector’s price decision, partly improving the openness and transparency of public products and services’ price decision. However, there are still various corrupt practices during the price hearing practice in our country, which are questioned by all walks of life. On the one hand, stipulation of price hearing is generalized in relevant laws, which fails to ensure the rights and obligations of stakeholders. As a result, consumers are in a vulnerable position among the interest subject structure, which consist of the government, business operators and consumers. On the other hand, consumers’vulnerable position in the public hearing leads to widespread dislocation, such as "The hearing will only result in price increase but not price reduction""Hearing Professions","Unequal Information" and so on. It severely weakens mass base and credibility of public price setting. Therefore, optimizing the price hearing system further and perfecting price hearing procedure are of great significance to promote price decision-making scientization.On the basis of domestic and foreign research on price hearing, this study uses game theory to analyze the construct of three major stakeholders (government departments, business operators and consumers) in our country’s price hearing system, and build a game model. Besides, combining with the case of price adjustment hearing of public transport in Beijing, the current study reveals a game power imbalance among the three major stakeholders in the practical price hearing, and analysis the cause of this dilemma. Finally, guided by the principle to balance the tripartite strength in the game, this study proposes corresponding countermeasures and suggestions from the perspective of the government, operators and consumers, hoping to perfect price hearing system in our country and speed up the pace of the citizens’ participate in social management.The main findings and implications of this study are concluded as follows. First, it reveals the specific problems of price hearing system in our country. Natural imbalance of each stakeholder’s status exist in our country’s price hearing system. explicit stipulation on the demarcation and selection of participants is lacked in the law, and participants’right of ingress into price hearing are under the control of the government departments. Second, it adopts the method of game theory to build a pair-wise game relationships among government departments, business operators and consumers, in order to understand how the main players game with each other in the process of price hearing, and how their game playing affect the results of the price hearing. Third, it points out sorts of existed dilemmas in the price hearing, such as unequal status, unbalanced power and inconsistent effectiveness among the main stakeholders. It further argues that all these dilemmas are the results of the lack of legal system, superficial democratic consciousness, unclear relations between government and enterprises, and the characteristics of main agent, etc., and then it comes up with corresponding solutions accordingly.