中文摘要
我们利用一套涵盖日本中央政府采购的大部分建设项目的新数据集，记录了日本建筑企业之间广泛存在合谋的证据。该数据集包含约42,000场拍卖的信息，中标金额合计约400亿美元。我们通过考察所有初始投标均未满足不公开的保留价要求的拍卖中出现的重新投标，来识别合谋。我们识别出1,000多家行为与竞争性行为不一致的企业。这些投标者中标约15,000个项目，约占样本项目总数的37%。
Abstract
We document evidence of widespread collusion among construction firms in Japan using a novel data set covering most of the construction projects procured by the Japanese national government. Our data set contains information on about 42,000 auctions whose award amount sums to about $40 billion. We identify collusion by focusing on rebids that occur for auctions in which all (initial) bids fail to meet the secret reserve price. We identify more than 1,000 firms whose conduct is inconsistent with competitive behavior. These bidders were awarded about 15,000 projects, or about 37% of the total number of projects in our sample.