Analysis of Multinational Builders’ Corruption Based on Evolutionary Game from the Perspective of International Reputation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Disclaimer: I would like to begin by stating that I am completely ignorant of the literature and research terminology in the field of construction engineering, and throughout this report I have offered my own suggestions and opinions only from the perspective of a researcher in traditional and evolutionary game theory.

 

This paper exploits an evolutionary game theory framework to analyze the effect of international reputation on the corruption behavior of cross-border constructional engineering. The findings indicate that the sensitivity of each party involved in the corruption behavior differs concerning international reputation, and excessive reputation of the supervisory company can effectively curb the corrupt behavior of Subcontracting, and that the behavior of the General contracting company shows a sense of inertia, while the three main parties exhibit multi-stage decision-making characteristics as their international reputation gradually improves. I think this is generally a good research, very close to publish. I have listed my concerns and suggestions as follows.

 

--Setup

 

[Hard but important suggestion] The model devides the companies into 3 parties (GCC, SuperC, and SubconC). I was wondering if the roles of the company are interchangeable, say, Company A is GCC in a project, but becomes the SuperC in another. If this is possible, how does a firm's G1, G2 and G3 related?

 

Table 1 is a bit redundant. Some of the parameters can be combined together, to make the economic meaning more sound and make it readable for non-engineering-based readers.

 

Table 2 should be rewritten into an EFG or a NFG, showing the strategies, payoffs, timing and the information set clearly.

 

--Result and analysis

 

It seems that th authors mainly discuss one equilibrium (1,1,0). In what cases the other equilibria make sense?

 

In section 5.1, how does the key parameters (reputation) affect the speed of convergence?

 

--Misellaneous

 

Some non-standard punctuation appears in the text (such as Eq. 16, Eq. 19, line 275, etc.) It seems that they are from Chinese characters. Please fix it to standard English/Latin punctuation.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The writing flow is accpetable but not so smooth.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf