Corporate heads, from smaller businesses to fortune 100 companies, do this on the regular. They know exactly where the want to establish/expand/relocate their HQ... yet they go through these BS exercises for free press, PR/political connections and favors, "market research", ego massaging, sociopathic satisfaction, etc... and still, they nearly always locate exactly where they wanted to locate from the beginning.
Amazon was NEVER going to locate in Philadelphia (and certainly not Raleigh
). The local and state officials knew this from the beginning, but they went right along with it for the national spotlight/"street cred"/free national advertising of their "corpporate compensation packages" for future corporate attraction potential that the whole exercise afforded.