The Disappearing Winners: An MAS Study of Community-Type Rivalry in Construction Markets

Business communities in the construction market are becoming increasingly diverse, with a deepening impact on industrial development and enterprise competition. Despite many existing empirical studies on communities, they weaken competitive interactions and have limited applicability to the dynamic issues of community formation and evolution. To address the gaps identified in the literature on bidding competition dynamics, this study constructs a multi-agent system (MAS) model. This model is designed to simulate the formation of community-type rivalry in the construction market by incorporating key variables identified from empirical observations of bidding behavior. It also designs and runs two experiments focusing on the impact of overall market factors and enterprises’ own factors on the formation of an equilibrium state of community-type rivalry to explore the mechanism behind its formation. We find that the density of community networks and the process of community formation are significantly affected by the number of enterprises, the scope of competition among enterprises, and the lifespan of the link, while they are not significantly affected by the size of the market or the exit thresholds of enterprises. In addition, this study finds that, under the bidding competition rule, the number of times that an enterprise bids is closely related to its network location advantage. However, larger and more mature enterprises have difficulty in maintaining a central position in a competitive network. This study provides different perspectives for an understanding of corporate community formation and offers valuable insights into the governance of community phenomena in the construction market.