Search Results (208)

Government–enterprise collaboration does not automatically produce responsibility sharing in digital environmental governance. Integrating Social Role Theory with evolutionary game theory, this study constructs a role-based evolutionary game model to examine how governments and enterprises adjust responsibility strategies under bounded rationality. The model incorporates legitimacy benefits, role-deviation losses, digital governance capacity, compliance costs, penalties, and governance costs. Results show two possible stable outcomes—mutual responsibility fulfillment and mutual shirking—with threshold-sensitive dynamics. Stronger digital capacity, detection probability, penalties, and legitimacy incentives, combined with lower costs, expand the attraction basin of mutual responsibility fulfillment; weak monitoring, high costs, insufficient penalties, and ambiguous boundaries increase shirking risk. A focused VRBG mechanism—value cultivation, responsibility identification, benefit sharing, and guarantee mechanisms—is proposed to adjust the incentive conditions that make responsibility fulfillment self-reinforcing. Full article

Energy efficiency interventions are typically evaluated and implemented at the single-firm level, yet energy use and savings are shaped by interdependent decisions distributed across the supply chain, spanning sourcing, production, inventory, logistics, and financing. A foundational observation motivating this paper is that some energy efficiency actions are only possible through inter-firm cooperation: they require changes to partners’ processes or technologies, create benefits that accrue to different actors than those bearing the investment costs, and demand governance mechanisms (e.g., cost-sharing contract, buyer-financed supplier development, supply chain finance instruments) to be financially viable. This paper proposes CHAIN-EE (Collaborative Holistic Approach for Integrated Network Energy Efficiency), an action-oriented framework that operationalizes systems thinking into a practical roadmap for supply chain decision-makers. CHAIN-EE integrates three interconnected phases: (A) supply-chain energy diagnosis, covering boundary definition, baseline construction, and hotspot identification across nodes and flows; (B) action portfolio design, structured around a six-lever intervention taxonomy and multi-criteria evaluation embedding a cost–benefit alignment map that makes governance feasibility an explicit selection criterion; and (C) governance and continuous improvement, including incentive alignment, investment architecture and ISO 50001-compatible performance management. Evidence from four European research projects spanning the food cold chain, dairy, food-and-beverage/transport value chains, and HORECA illustrates how each phase operates in practice across different sectors and governance contexts. The paper contributes an integrative, sector-adaptable structure for supply chain energy efficiency programmes, grounded in both analytical research and applied project experience, and a targeted research agenda on cross-node rebound effects, data-enabled energy flow mapping, and multi-tier coordination mechanisms. Full article

Although rural public cultural spaces in China have expanded rapidly, many struggle to maintain stable and sustained public participation. Taking Sanchalu Village in Wuhan as a case, this study examines how multi-actor interactions transform fragmented and short-term participation into a resilient participatory structure. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, the study analyzed semi-structured interviews with 13 government officials, village cadres, enterprise representatives, and villagers, supplemented by participant observation and documentary materials. The findings identify an adaptive linkage process in which external resource embedding activates participation, village-level organizations promote the institutionalization of participation through incentive mechanisms and participation channels, internal and external resources are integrated through trust-based reciprocity, and multi-actor collaboration stabilizes governance arrangements. Accordingly, participation resilience develops through sustained participation, organizational mediation, and institutional safeguards rather than through infrastructure provision alone. This study clarifies how participation resilience supports the social sustainability of rural public cultural spaces and offers practical guidance for developing demand-responsive, locally embedded, and institutionally sustained participation mechanisms. Full article

Toxic metal pollution in farmland soils has become a critical environmental issue threatening land security and agricultural sustainability. This study develops an evolutionary game model involving the government, enterprises, the public, and environmental public-interest organizations to analyze the dynamic interactions underlying multi-actor governance. By combining equilibrium analysis with numerical simulations, the study examines the conditions for collaborative governance and the effects of key parameters on the system’s evolution. The results reveal a stage-based trajectory: weak regulation and limited participation in the early stage lead to persistent illegal discharge; strengthened government intervention and rising social participation in the transitional stage promote more coordinated supervision, although enterprises may still behave non-compliantly; in the mature stage, favorable cost–benefit conditions induce enterprises to adopt compliant treatment, reducing reliance on continuous external oversight. Further analysis shows that effective incentive and deterrence mechanisms are essential for activating multi-actor responses, while enterprises’ strategies are mainly driven by pollution-control costs, expected returns, and potential losses, and social participation depends on monitoring costs, expected benefits, and government support. Initial strategy distributions have limited influence on long-term outcomes. These findings provide policy-relevant insights for improving institutional design and strengthening collaborative governance in the management of toxic metal pollution in China’s farmland soils. Full article

This paper investigates the dynamic coopetition and capacity-sharing strategies between an Integrated Manufacturer and a Developer under R&D uncertainty, focusing on the governance of strategically scarce capacity. By constructing a two-stage game model, we analyze how government intervention and risk-hedging mechanisms influence the allocation of idle strategically scarce capacity in innovation-driven industries. The findings reveal a two-sided paradoxical behavioral pattern: in the low-probability R&D interval, rather than relying on safe contract manufacturing, the Integrated Manufacturer counter-intuitively reduces collaborative duration to aggressively gamble on its immature product. Conversely, in the high-probability R&D interval, where conventional wisdom predicts an aggressive pivot to self-production, the manufacturer paradoxically extends or maintains the contract manufacturing duration, driven by the partner’s full cost-sharing incentive mechanism. Furthermore, To maximize the total supply output of strategically scarce resources during collaboration, we uncover a non-linear ‘counterproductive subsidy trap’ and propose a binary ‘critical mass’ policy rule: governments should either withhold subsidies entirely or commit sufficient funding to bypass the supply deficit zone. This framework provides a theoretical foundation for managing scarcity in capital-intensive sectors such as biopharmaceuticals and semiconductors. Full article

From the perspective of symbiosis theory, collaborative work safety governance in industrial parks can be understood as a dynamic multi-actor symbiotic system jointly composed of the park management committee, leading enterprises, and small and medium-sized enterprises. To examine how reciprocal symbiosis among multiple actors affects system-level safety performance and sustainable operation, this study develops a differential game model in which the work safety level of the industrial park evolves dynamically over time. The model comparatively analyzes the work safety efforts, discounted payoffs of symbiotic units, and the overall work safety level of the park under different decision-making mechanisms and reciprocal symbiosis modes. The results show that: (1) under the leading-enterprise-dominated mode, as the coefficient of work safety resource sharing increases, the overall work safety level of the park correspondingly improves; however, once this coefficient exceeds a certain threshold, it becomes unfavorable to the further growth of the leading enterprise’s own benefit; (2) under the park-management-committee-led mode, as the cost-sharing coefficient increases, the overall work safety level of the park continues to improve, but an excessively high cost-sharing coefficient weakens the incentive for the park management committee to increase its benefit; and (3) under certain conditions, the leading-enterprise-dominated mode, the park-management-committee-led mode, and the deep collaboration mode can all improve both the park’s work safety level and the discounted payoffs of symbiotic units, but the deep collaboration mode performs best in enhancing the overall work safety level and the total system payoff. Compared with the park-management-committee-led mode, the leading-enterprise-dominated mode is more sensitive in its impact on the total payoff of the industrial park. These findings indicate that sustainable work safety improvement in industrial parks cannot rely solely on increasing governance inputs or on the actions of a single actor. Instead, it requires a system-wide balance among safety performance, economic efficiency, resource-sharing sustainability, and the long-term stability of collaborative relationships. The study provides a system-oriented theoretical basis for optimizing reciprocal symbiosis mechanisms and promoting the sustainable development of industrial parks. Full article

With the widespread application of IoT and AI technologies in the sports equipment manufacturing sector, traditional sports equipment manufacturers are facing challenges such as financial pressures, technological integration barriers, and the gradual reduction in government subsidies during digital transformation. To investigate the intrinsic mechanism of multi-stakeholder collaborative transformation, this paper, based on the bounded rationality assumption, incorporates the government, sports equipment manufacturers, and third-party digital service providers into a unified analytical framework. A tripartite evolutionary game model is constructed, systematically deriving the replication dynamic equations for each stakeholder under different strategies, and analyzing the stability of the system equilibrium point using the Jacobian matrix. This study shows that the sustainability of government subsidies depends on the trade-off between social benefits, administrative costs, and subsidy expenditures; whether manufacturers choose to cooperate is mainly influenced by the cost of self-purchased equipment, digital service fees, operation and maintenance risks, and residual value recovery; and the investment willingness of digital service providers depends on infrastructure construction costs, service revenue, and government support. Further simulation analysis shows that a higher initial willingness to cooperate can accelerate system convergence, a moderate capital interest rate helps balance the incentives of both supply and demand sides, excessively high core equipment prices will inhibit manufacturers’ willingness to cooperate, and reasonable digital service fees are key to achieving stable collaboration. This paper provides a theoretical basis for policy optimization, service pricing, and industrial collaborative governance in the digital transformation of the sports manufacturing industry. Full article

The entry of JD.com into the food delivery sector and the ensuing subsidy competition have resulted in irrational competition, merchant profit squeezes, and food safety risks in China. This study therefore investigates the collaborative governance mechanisms for food delivery platforms under involutionary competition driven by traffic contestation. A two-agent evolutionary game model between platforms and merchants is developed, and Q-learning simulations are conducted to capture dynamic learning behaviors. The analysis examines the effects of coupon face value, cost-sharing mechanisms, traffic incentives, and government incentive-penalty policies on the strategic choices of both agents. Key findings reveal that merchants are more sensitive than platforms to traffic incentives and government penalties. Traffic-dependent merchants and traffic-independent merchants exhibit significantly different responses to government interventions. The coupon face value demonstrates a threshold effect, where only a reasonable range encourages compliant behavior among both parties. Based on these results, a collaborative governance framework is proposed. For traffic-dependent merchants, the government should focus on regulating platform behaviors and supervising coupon value controls, while platforms should establish a reward-oriented, penalty-supported incentive mechanism. For traffic-independent merchants, the government should strengthen consumer-reporting penalty mechanisms and strictly control collusion risks between platforms and merchants. Platforms should increase inspection frequency and reinforce penalties to prevent, at the source, the decline in product quality and market disorder induced by involutionary competition. This study provides strategic insights for achieving collaborative governance of involutionary competition in platform economies under intense traffic contestation. Full article

The rapid proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) has positioned Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology as an important enabler for mitigating grid congestion, accelerating the energy transition, and supporting the sustainable transition of regional energy systems. However, recent incentive mechanisms often fail to balance EV users’ willingness to participate with the economic viability of intermediary operators, thereby hindering effective multi-party collaboration in Regional Integrated Energy System (RIES). To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel commission-based service fee mechanism for V2G incentive mechanisms to dynamically regulate revenue distribution among Integrated Energy System Operator (IESO), Energy Supplier (ES), Charging Station Operator (CSO), and Electric Vehicle Aggregator (EVA). The study further examines how different incentive strategies affect V2G market liquidity. Case studies indicate that the proposed strategy significantly increases effective V2G transaction power while preserving CSO profit margins and encouraging EV participation. The results also indicate that the reward rate, commission rate, and subsidy have nonlinear effects on V2G transaction performance and should be set within reasonable ranges. The proposed model also exhibits superior performance in enhancing system economic benefits and promoting multi-agent coordination. It provides an actionable framework for sustaining CSO participation under upper-level subsidy mechanisms while improving the long-term commercial viability and ecological sustainability of smart-grid ecosystems. These findings provide practical guidance for designing incentive policies that facilitate the low-carbon energy transition and sustainable smart-grid development. Full article

Icing and galloping disasters threaten the safe operation of power transmission lines, and effective response depends on multi-agent collaboration. To address the insufficient attention paid in existing studies to grassroots execution constraints, this paper constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model involving local governments, power grid enterprise O&M management, and grassroots O&M teams. The model integrates collaborative investment, agency costs, benefit sharing, and multi-layer reward–punishment mechanisms into a unified framework. Replicator dynamics and numerical simulations are then used to analyze the evolution of collaborative strategies; the parameters are non-dimensional benchmark values rather than empirically calibrated estimates. The results show that the system exhibits multi-stability and path dependence, with fully non-collaborative and fully collaborative equilibria possibly remaining stable simultaneously. The combination of strong government regulation and incentives with high-level enterprise collaborative management is the key mechanism for overcoming the low-collaboration trap, and strict accountability has higher marginal policy efficiency than equivalent subsidies. Reducing grassroots execution costs and moderately increasing their share of disaster mitigation benefits can accelerate collaborative convergence and expand the attraction basin of the high-collaboration equilibrium. This study provides theoretical support and mechanism-design implications for enhancing the resilience of collaborative emergency response for power transmission lines under extreme weather conditions. Full article

The Engineering-Procurement-Construction (EPC) general contracting model has emerged as the dominant delivery method for large-scale infrastructure and industrial projects in China. However, contemporary EPC project cost control remains plagued by critical industry challenges, including fragmented cross-stage coordination, pervasive data silos, and the shallow integration of digital technologies into core management processes. This study considers three key stakeholders—government regulators, project owners, and EPC general contractors—and develops a tripartite evolutionary game model to analyze the strategic interactions underlying intelligent cost control in EPC projects. We examine the evolutionary stability of each stakeholder’s strategy selection, explore how various factors influence tripartite strategic choices, and further investigate the stability of equilibrium points in the game system. The key findings are summarized as follows: (1) Strengthening government incentives and penalties simultaneously promotes owners’ investment in intelligent cost control systems and general contractors’ active collaborative cost management. However, excessive incentive intensity undermines the government’s regulatory effectiveness. (2) Establishing a revenue-sharing mechanism for excess cost savings fully stimulates the spontaneous cooperation willingness of owners and general contractors, serving as the cornerstone for market-oriented operation of intelligent cost control. (3) Reducing owners’ intelligent construction investment costs and general contractors’ collaborative control costs effectively addresses practical implementation barriers and accelerates the digital upgrading of engineering cost management. Finally, numerical simulations are performed using MATLAB R2020b to validate theoretical findings. Full article

Cold-chain supply systems depend on a sequence of linked production and logistics decisions. In prepared-food cold chains, quality may deteriorate not because one visible failure occurs, but because testing, traceability records, temperature monitoring, and abnormal-condition reporting are gradually weakened under cost pressure. Once such hidden effort reduction accumulates, external disturbances may push the system from strict assurance to weakened governance. To explain this nonlinear process, an asymmetric evolutionary game is built between prepared-food producers and cold-chain logistics providers, each choosing between strict and weakened quality assurance. White Gaussian noise is introduced to represent random operating shocks, and the two-population strategy system is projected onto a system-level quality-governance coordinate, $q$. This projection is used as a transparent baseline coordinate rather than as an assumption of linear system evolution. The reduced system is then transformed into a stochastic cusp catastrophe model, with a resilience indicator used to measure the distance from critical transition conditions. Numerical simulations show that quality assurance costs and short-term cost-saving benefits move the system toward a weakened-governance basin, whereas external incentives, coordination degree, and credible accountability mechanisms support recovery toward strict collaboration. The framework offers a scenario-based resilience diagnosis approach for identifying threshold effects in cold-chain quality governance. Digital traceability, temperature-data sharing, incentive alignment, and accountability rules are further interpreted as operational innovations that improve resilience and reduce avoidable quality losses in sustainable cold-chain operations. Full article

Sustainable higher education governance requires durable institutional mechanisms that support student engagement, faculty participation in education, and organizational coordination. Against the backdrop of China’s “Three-All Education” framework, academic culture has become a broader governance issue involving student development, faculty engagement, and organizational operation. This study aims to examine the current conditions and associated factors of academic culture governance in resource-constrained undergraduate universities. Based on survey data from three undergraduate institutions in Gansu Province, China, including 6120 valid student questionnaires and 735 valid faculty questionnaires, this study combines group difference tests with multiple regression analysis. The findings show that the sampled institutions face three main challenges: insufficient continuity in students’ academic goal commitment, limited faculty educational engagement under research-oriented incentives, and weak organizational coordination. Regression results further indicate that clarity of learning goals is significantly and positively associated with students’ learning status; perceived research orientation is significantly and negatively associated with faculty engagement in education; and information sharing and clarity of responsibility are significantly and positively associated with organizational coordination. These findings suggest that sustainable academic culture governance depends on the alignment of student goal support, faculty incentive structures, and collaborative organizational operation. Full article

This study systematically explores the underlying mechanisms of collaborative innovation driving the green transformation of traditional energy enterprises. Existing research primarily focuses on enterprise scale and overall competitiveness, rarely delving into these specific collaborative pathways. Furthermore, studies employing evolutionary game theory to analyze the tripartite relationship among the government, traditional energy, and emerging technology enterprises remain fragmented, failing to fully capture the dynamic mechanisms of multi-stakeholder strategic choices. To bridge these gaps, this paper constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model incorporating coordination costs and the benefit distribution ratio to explore their influence mechanisms. Replicator dynamics equations are employed to identify stable cooperation conditions, overcoming traditional two-party framework constraints. Additionally, MATLAB R2024b numerical simulations validate the theoretical findings. The results reveal two evolutionarily stable equilibrium points. First, higher initial willingness among participants accelerates the system’s evolution toward a stable cooperative state. Second, coordination costs induced by information asymmetry act as a core bottleneck that deters participation and risks collaborative collapse. Third, targeted government incentives and a rational benefit distribution ratio directly determine cooperation willingness; notably, enterprises adopt collaborative strategies only when this ratio falls between 0.27 and 0.69. Fourth, fair and transparent supervision is crucial for mitigating trust deficits and distribution disputes. Ultimately, scientifically designing incentives, optimizing benefit structures, promoting information sharing, and establishing robust supervision effectively facilitate a sustainable tripartite collaborative innovation pattern. Full article

Frequent occurrences of inter-regional emergencies constitute critical impediments to global security and sustainable development, necessitating enhanced intergovernmental emergency collaboration. This study employs a network evolutionary game model (NEGM) to examine how vertical interventions shape diffusion mechanisms of cooperative strategies among local governments. The results show that (1) solely intensifying penalties or rewards yields diminishing marginal returns in incentivizing local governments to adopt a proactive cooperative strategy; (2) elevating the cost-sharing index significantly accelerates the diffusion rate of cooperative strategies, effectively mobilizing broader subnational engagement in public health emergency response; and (3) the tripartite integration of penalty-based enforcement, reward incentives, and cost-sharing mechanisms demonstrates synergistic superiority over alternative policy instruments—whether implemented individually or in pairwise combinations. Full article