CRITIC-Based Vertical Collusion Control Quality Prediction Based on the Coupling and Coordination Degrees of Socioenvironmental and Public-Investment Bidding Systems in China

Currently, in China, the bidding processes for government socioenvironmental projects face threats of collusion between officials and vendors. This study introduces a coupling and coordination degree-measurement model to study the relationship between the quality of vertical collusion controls and the socioenvironmental system of China based on bidding data taken from 2006 to 2020. The coupling degree describes the socioeconomic influence felt between systems, and the coordination degree refers to their sustainable focused cooperation and mutual influence. The criteria importance through intercriteria correlation method was used to quantify these degrees. To smooth out periods of missing data, the autoregressive integrated moving average model was employed, and the first-order, one-variable, time-series forecasting method was then used to project the trend to 2025. The results revealed that the quality of vertical collusion controls based on the degrees of coupling and coordination between external socioenvironmental and public investment systems ranged from 0.151 to 0.700. Dissonance was detected from 2006 to 2015, but the overall coupling degree has been on an upward trend, peaking in 2020. Currently, the quality of vertical collusion controls is in its primary coordination stage, although it is improving rapidly. From the projected years, both coupling and coordination degrees will enter an intermediate coordination stage by 2022, when the growth rate of the coupling degree is overtaken by that of the coordination degree, as long as active strategies are applied to harmonize the systems in terms of anticollusion measures.