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

Shitao Gong,Linyan Chen,Zhou Li,Xin Gao

doi:10.3390/ijerph18073594

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.

Highlights

The construction industry is deemed as one of the most dangerous industries due to its complicated construction environment, frequent use of heavy equipment and inevitable hazardous worker interactions [1]
Safety investment and safety supervision play a pivotal role in improving occupational health and safety in the construction industry
Existing studies mainly focus on two aspects, the first is the safety supervision decision-making optimization, and the second is the establishment of information systems to strengthen the information communication between the safety supervision stakeholders

Summary

Introduction

The construction industry is deemed as one of the most dangerous industries due to its complicated construction environment, frequent use of heavy equipment and inevitable hazardous worker interactions [1]. 22% of occupational fatalities in America, 27.2% in Britain, and 27.6% in Korea occur in the construction industry [2,3,4]. In China, a total of 3843 fatal injuries were occurred at construction sites in 2017, which accounts for 34.3% of all workplace fatalities [5]. These high casualty rates reflect the poor safety performance in the construction industry around the world [6,7], which has become a significant public health problem. It is essential to improve occupational health and safety as well as safety performance in the industry [8]. Many studies have been performed to investigate the key factors in determining construction safety performance, and current research has reached a consensus that the safety performance of construction

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