An Empirical Study of Determinants of Pay-for-Performance in PPP Procurement
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors
this article on Pay-for-performance in PPP procurement is interesting and well written.
I'm glad to advise for publication of this article in the present form.
I particularly appreciate the research design that in my opinion is clear and informative.
I also think other authors may take advantages of the limits you introduced in the article.
I agree that literature so far hasn't pay enough attention to this topic.
Author Response
Points:
this article on Pay-for-performance in PPP procurement is interesting and well written.
I'm glad to advise for publication of this article in the present form.
I particularly appreciate the research design that in my opinion is clear and informative.
I also think other authors may take advantages of the limits you introduced in the article.
I agree that literature so far hasn't pay enough attention to this topic.
Response:
Dear Referee1,
Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. I really appreciate your acknowledgment of the paper which is a great encouragement for our research. At the same time, we also made some revisions to the paper according to the reviewers' comments, hoping to further improve the quality of the paper.
Best regards!
Reviewer 2 Report
1. Usually don't write abbreviation of the word in Keywords.
2.The part of abstract is not attractive
3. Introduction you can present better novelty of your work
4. Literature analysis can be improved
5. Conclusions please report only relevant information
6. Please check all text to see grammatical errors
7. Avoid repetitions. I can see several repetitions at different places in this paper. Thorough proofreading is required.
8. There is no scope for future research. A clear direction for future research is required.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
You study deals with deals with an interesting paper: Determinants of Pay-for-Performance in PPP Procurement, having as case study China's Eco-Environmental PPP Projects. You begin to use a descriptive style to explain the content of your study. However since the abstract I have some doubts. Please see my below comments:
Abstract.
What is the meaning of PPP Projects and fsQCA method. Please clarify the acronym.
Introduction: The same comment as above. PPP is Providing Public Services??? Please, define all the acronyms that you use firstly and then you may use only the acronym.
Also in the introduction clarify the purpose of the study, Instead of say : “This study helps to broaden the perspective of research … “ you can say : The purpose of this study is….In the next paragraph of the introduction clarify in a better way the structure of the paper. Also here I see that some citations are not well (e.g. Liu & Xue. (2018)) and I suggest to add the citation of the Open Public Services White Paper.
Theoretical Framework – Please substitute theoretical framework by other title. I think it would be more clear in this case. Also here describe your acronyms that you use for the first time.
Data Construction and Research Methods – if you can be more synthetic here it would be ideal
Data Analysis and Empirical Results – Please pay attention to the layout of the tables that you use. You can also add the source: Own source based on…
Discussions and Implications - Instead of Discussions use the concept “Discussion”. Please in addition to practical implications, clarify what are the type of the other contributions: political, for knowledge???
Conclusions and limitation – I would like to see here a link with literature review. Please clarify here paths for future research. You mentioned it, but in my opinion is to vague.
Last, but not the least avoid food-notes.
Good work on the next steps.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
This paper identified an interesting topic about the determinants of Pay-for-Performance in PPP. The major strength is the data analysis. However, it has several critical issues that should be solved before publication.
1. The language of the paper should be improved. So far, it is difficult to read. For example, the title could be “Empirical Study of Determinants of Pay-for-Performance in PPP Procurement”. Another example is in Line 11-13. I would write it as “We took 884 Eco-Environmental PPP Projects as a sample and used the fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis method to discuss the linkage effects on the pay-for-performance procurements of 12 technological, organizational, and environmental conditions based on 13 "Technology-Organization-Environment" (TOE) frameworks”. The authors should make the paper more readable. In Line 33, please remove the space between perform and ance.
2. The paper does not tell a cohesive story. For example, the paper states that pay-for-performance is crucial to realizing the eco-environmental performance and VfM of fiscal expenditures. Why? The paper should define the terms such as value-for-money, principal-agent theory, eco-environmental performance, and conditional configurations.
3. In Line 52, the reference is missing.
4. Lines 62-63 should be combined with the previous paragraph.
5. I cannot find a tightly reasoned argument evident throughout the paper. For example, in Lines 78-82, the paper says, “few scholars have paid attention to the issue of "how to pay effectively" 78 from the perspective of finance.” Then, the paper lists several studies and methods for pay-for-performance.
6. The paper states two research questions in the introduction, but does not clearly answer them in the conclusions. It is difficult to find the major point(s) of the paper.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
