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• Demand motivation and environmental factors drive or restrain excessive behavior. • Increasing the sense of responsibility to reduce the government's excessive behavior. • Demand has intermediary role in impact of external environment on excessive behavior. • Attaching the direct negative impact of lack of project information on behavior. • Strengthening government supervision on others besides the government-paid project. The excessive behavior of the government is a common phenomenon in the practice of PPP projects such as transportation, municipal engineering and environmental governance. Analyzing the excessive behaviors of the government in PPP projects is very important to improve project performance and success. Based on the field dynamic theory, the demand of government and the external environment participating in PPP are the important reasons for excessive behavior. Through literature analysis, 14 government demands and 10 environmental factors that influence the government's excessive behavior are identified, and a hypothesis model of the influencing path of government's excessive behavior is constructed. 166 valid data are collected through a questionnaire survey. Carrying out factor analysis, hypothesis, and path test, the main findings are as follows: Government's demands are divided into the demand of satisfying public activities, self-interest, responsibility, and relieving financial pressure; External environmental factors are divided into social conditions, department mechanism, and project information; The demand for responsibility plays a restraining role, while the other types of demand are opposite, and these demands play an intermediary role in the impact path of external environment on excessive behavior; Among the environmental factors, only the lack of project information has a direct influence on the government excessive behavior; In the feasibility subsidy project, the risk of excessive behavior is high, especially for transportation projects with certain toll nature. The study provides suggestions for reducing the risk of government behavior in PPP projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In public–private partnership (PPP) project, government's control right (GCR) cannot be completely defined by contract information. Government has some advantageous information resources outside of the contract, such as status, supervision level, trust etc. These information lead investors to overestimate the GCR and aggravate the escalation of commitment (EOC), especially for investors who prefer the other-face concern. According to the degree of quantification of information owned by government in a PPP project, the study divided GCR into explicit control rights (ECR) and implicit control rights (ICR). In order to discuss the difference of actions that two types' control right on investor's EOC who have other-face concern. The study collected 176 valid data through scenario questionnaires and constructed the structural equation model with regulating effect. After verifying the model with AMOS. We found the ECR influence investor's EOC significantly, while the ICR does not; the other-face concern only regulate the influence of ICR on investors' EOC. These findings are helpful to reduce the behavioral risk of investors' EOC in PPP project. • Escalation of commitment (EOC) is discussed in PPP project, which offers new insight. • 14 secondary indicators can measure government's control rights (GCR) in PPP project. • GCR includes explicit control rights (ECR) and implicit control rights (ICR). • ECR influence investor's EOC significantly, while the ICR does not. • Other-face concern regulates the influence of ICR on investors' EOC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Investor may try to keep returns below guarantee level for government's compensation. • To prevent investors' speculations, government should set incentive mechanisms. • A reasonable incentive mechanism can affect investors' attitude greatly. Mechanisms for risk sharing are critical in infrastructure project financing. In public-private partnerships (PPP) for highway projects, provision of guarantees by the government to the investors is an important risk-sharing scheme. Because the government does not have the same information that private investors have, information asymmetry leads to speculation. In this paper, investors grab minimum revenue guarantee by deliberately reducing in earnings is identified as a moral hazard. To solve this problem, a game theory model for studying mechanisms that encourage/incentivize investors to adopt a positive attitude toward cooperation with the government is established. In particular, we design incentive mechanisms that engage private investors based on their profitability outlook. The results show that blindly increasing the amount of a reward or a penalty is not an effective way to guide an investor's behavior. Adopting flexible incentive mechanisms during different stages of a project proves effective in influencing investors' willingness to cooperate with the government as well as in maximizing the benefits they realize from the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) refinancing is a complex activity with significant uncertainty, including environment-related and decision-maker-related uncertainty. Although value evaluation techniques, like Real Option (RO) and Fuzzy Real Option, have been developed to deal with uncertainty, the reliability of the used project information is ignored. This study aims to establish a refinancing value evaluation model considering both uncertainty and reliability. A Z-number based Real Option (ZRO) model is proposed using Z-numbers to represent the parameter values in the traditional RO model. In the Z-numbers, subjective evaluation of project parameters and information reliability are characterized. Moreover, a novel method is proposed to objectively evaluate the expert's reliability by considering the expert's multiple characteristics. The proposed model can determine refinancing values under various scenarios and reliability. A numerical case is used to validate the model performance. The results show that the refinancing value becomes higher when the information reliability increases. Changes in the underlying project value affect the refinancing option value most, while the impact of the annual project volatility is minimal. The proposed ZRO model could be applied to search for potential investors and as a bargaining tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a composite minimizing average check loss estimation procedure for composite quantile regression (CQR) in the single-index coefficient model (SICM). The asymptotic normalities of the proposed estimators are established, and the asymptotic relative efficiencies (ARE) of the proposed estimators compared with those by least square method are also discussed. We further investigate a variable selection procedure by combining the proposed estimation method with adaptive LASSO penalized method in CQR of SICM. The oracle property of the proposed variable selection method is also established. Simulations with various non-normal errors and one real data application are conducted to assess the finite sample performance of the proposed estimation and variable selection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]