Effects of Different Face-Saving Concerns on the Escalation of Commitment between State-Owned and Private Investors in PPP Projects

In public–private partnership (PPP) projects, state-owned investors, with their administrative attributes, tend to be more concerned with their own face-saving (self-face) concerns, whereas private investors that partner with the government pay more attention to the government’s face-saving (other-face) concerns than their own. The two kinds of face-saving concerns both aggravate escalation of commitment (EOC). Accordingly, a multigroup model based on questionnaire data was built to analyze the differences in face-saving concerns of the two types of investors and the cross-enterprise differences that influence investors’ EOC. The main findings are as follows: state-owned investors prefer self-face concerns; the influence of face-saving concerns on investors’ EOC does not differ across enterprises; and self-face concerns and other-face concerns each have significant influence on both kinds of investors’ EOC, but the latter plays a larger role. The study enriches the understanding of EOC and emphasizes the advantages of private capital in reducing investors’ behavioral risk. The findings are conducive to improving the mechanism and control of multistakeholder EOC in PPP projects.