关键词: BOT, 损失规避, 回购补偿, Nash谈判

Abstract: BOT(Build-Operate-Transfer) projects are used to reduce the financial burden on the government incurred from improving the economy and the quality of services. Under a BOT scheme, during the concession period, the enterprise undertakes finance, construction, operation and maintenance of an infrastructure, while the government allows the enterprise to charge tolls from users. However, the unfairness in the design of the risk allocation mechanism and the irrationality in decision-making have brought enormous difficulties for enterprises to recover their investment costs, which in turn has led to the early termination of transportation BOT projects. Early termination severely impacts participating enterprises. To address this, governments and enterprises may agree on buybacks, where government compensation is critical to successful buybacks. Existing compensation calculation methods, however, are irrational and unfair, causing endless disputes and heavy losses. Thus, the Nash bargaining game is adopted, as its solution satisfies axioms like Pareto efficiency and symmetry, balancing fairness and efficiency in distributing the “bargaining pie”.
In a real-world bargaining game, persons usually evaluate concessions made by themselves as their own losses, which implies that the aversion to concessions is the aversion to losses. The profit seeking nature of an enterprise indicates its tendency to avoid losses, while the government may also be loss averse. In the buyback compensation negotiation of traffic BOT projects, the success of compensation negotiations requires mutual concessions between the enterprise and the government. The aversion to concessions means that the enterprise and the government have the behavioral characteristics of avoiding losses. Therefore, it is crucial to construct a new compensation negotiation game model with loss aversion by adopting Nash bargaining, which is of great significance for the design of franchise contracts for traffic BOT projects.
The results in our work are shown as follows: (1)The more traffic attracted by the newly built road, the smaller the buyback compensation paid by the government to the enterprise. (2)The buyback compensation paid by the government to the enterprise is positively (or negatively) correlated with the loss aversion of the government (or the enterprise). (3)When the investment cost of the government is sufficiently low, the government will build a new road. With an increase in the investment cost, the greater the enterprise’s (or government’s) level of loss aversion is, the more likely the government will repurchase the traffic BOT project (or build a new road). When the investment cost further increases to a higher level, the government chooses to repurchase the traffic BOT project.
In future research, considering the variable investment cost of new roads, the compensation issue will be studied when the government repurchases the early terminating traffic BOT projects. On the other hand, the complexity and uncertainty of repurchasing early terminating traffic BOT projects hinder the government and the enterprise from obtaining sufficient information. Therefore, another future research is to investigate the buyback bargaining with incomplete information between the government and the enterprise.

Key words: BOT, loss aversion, buyback compensation, Nash bargaining