Research on incentive mechanism of major project subcontractor considering social responsibility

Abstract

Social responsibility is significant to the sustainable development of major projects. Aiming at the problem that major project subcontractors are not actively fulfilling their social responsibilities and have serious opportunistic behaviors that lead to low project efficiency, this paper started from the perspective of incentive mechanism design and used principalagent theory to establish a sub-bidding incentives model which considering fairness preferences. The results show that compared with the single subcontractor incentive model and the multi-bid incentive model that does not consider fairness preference, subcontractors' social responsibility effort level and engineering efficiency are significantly improved in the case of the sub-bidding incentive model considering fairness preference. Furthermore, the social responsibility efforts increase with the perceived fairness of subcontractors, decrease with the cost factor, the degree of risk avoidance and the size of the subcontractor's risk. Reasonable mechanisms can effectively restrict the opportunistic behaviors of subcontractors, improve social responsibility and engineering effectiveness. The research conclusions provide theoretical methods and decision-making basis for the sustainable development of the major projects and the contract design of improving the social responsibility of stakeholders.