Towards Sustainable Urbanization: Exploring the Influence Paths of the Urban Environment on Bidders' Collusive Willingness

Collusive bidding is a severe unethical and illegal practice in urban construction projects. This practice has been identified as the primary inhibitor of sustainable urban development. Collusive bidding is formed and can be profoundly impacted by the urban environment. Identifying the transmission routes of the impacts of the urban environment on collusive bidding is conducive to urban governors formulating collusive governance countermeasures to create a healthy pace of urbanization. Therefore, this study adopts the bootstrap method to empirically analyze the influence paths from the urban environment to bidders' collusive willingness. The data come from 675 collusion cases in China's urban construction projects and city environmental data. The research concludes that the urban environment affects collusive willingness mainly through indirect pathways. The number of collusive companies is the most critical mediating variable in the indirect path. Besides, when the collusive project and leading colluder are in the same province, little indirect utility can also be transmitted through the project profitability. These findings extend the body of knowledge on collusion-related studies in urban research. The study also offers practical implications, suggesting that urban governors and owners should take countermeasures to increase the difficulty of bidders to form a collusion team, thereby inhibiting collusive bidding.