From Shirking to Sharing: Evolutionary Game Analysis of Responsibility Mechanisms in Digital Environmental Governance

Differential Game Model of Collaborative Governance between Local Governments and Polluting Enterprises from the Perspective of Incentive Compatibility

Dynamic coordination between regulatory authorities and industrial enterprises is essential for achieving sustainable manufacturing and intelligent environmental governance. This study develops an incentive-compatible differential game framework to investigate the collaborative optimization of local government regulation and enterprise emission reduction under dynamic pollution evolution. By incorporating pollution stock as the state variable and regulatory intensity together with enterprise abatement effort as control variables, a feedback Nash equilibrium and a cooperative Pareto-optimal strategy are systematically derived. A state-dependent dynamic transfer payment mechanism is further designed to guarantee incentive compatibility while preserving individual rationality, enabling both participants to converge toward cooperative decision-making through recursive feedback optimization. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed mechanism significantly reduces long-term pollution accumulation, improves social welfare, and stabilizes the dynamic equilibrium under varying initial conditions. The framework establishes an effective dynamic control paradigm for intelligent environmental governance and provides valuable methodological references for distributed decision-making, networked optimization, and adaptive feedback systems in modern engineering applications, including digital industrial infrastructures and large-scale cyber-physical systems.

Legal Regulatory Dilemma and Theoretical Breakthrough of Social Collaborative Governance - Based on the Perspective of Multi-Agent Interaction

This paper addresses the collaborative-governance deficit caused by unclear stakeholder responsibilities and disordered interactions in complex public governance scenarios. From the perspective of multi-agent interaction, it constructs a three-dimensional “stakeholder-behavior-responsibility” analytical framework. Evolutionary game models are used to simulate strategic interaction processes, social network analysis is used to describe structural relationship characteristics, and scenario simulation experiments are used to observe behavioral performance. Through the integrated analysis of strategy, structure, and behavior, the study decodes the formation mechanism and regulatory path of collaborative governance dilemmas. The results show that clear and coordinated incentive-punishment rules can increase stable cooperation probability to 92.7%, a multi-center information transmission model can improve regulatory penetration efficiency by approximately 44.5%, and a detailed procedural rule framework can shorten task completion time by about 34.0%. The study verifies that a composite research method based on interaction perspective can effectively diagnose governance gaps and optimize institutional design for substantive rule-of-law collaboration.

Escape From the Competition: How Fair Competition Policy Influences Corporate ESG Behavior

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance serves not only as a response to urgent climate risks but also as a strategic tool for sustainable value creation. However, the rise in greenwashing suggests gaps in existing governance frameworks. This study examines the Fair Competition Review System (FCRS), a policy aimed at mitigating administrative monopolies by emphasizing market mechanisms. Unlike prior research that focuses primarily on firm‐level factors or macroeconomic interventions, this study situates FCRS within the framework of new institutional economics, constructing a causal chain from institutional pressures to corporate responses. Empirical results demonstrate that the FCRS significantly drives ESG behavior. Mechanism analysis identifies three key pathways: stimulation of green innovation, reduction of financing costs, and optimization of income distribution, each grounded in reduced institutional transaction costs. Further analysis underscores the importance of synergistic governance and highlights several factors that enhance policy effectiveness, including equity incentive systems, audit committees, regional rule‐of‐law environments, and digital infrastructure. A particularly novel finding is that identical external institutional pressures can lead to both substantive ESG implementation and strategic brownwashing, a phenomenon previously underexplored. This study extends the scope of institutional economics and refines the framework for understanding ESG performance drivers. Practically, it offers policymakers and enterprise leaders a roadmap for leveraging institutional pressures to achieve sustainable competitive advantages.

FROM MANDATE TO MOTIVATION: INCENTIVE COMPATIBILITY IN DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE GOVERNANCE

Digital infrastructure is often treated as a technical investment problem, although implementation depends equally on sustained cooperation among agencies, districts, project teams, and operators. This paper develops a conceptual explanation for uneven implementation in capable cities. It combines Hurwicz's incentive-compatibility approach with Herzberg's distinction between motivators and hygiene factors. The resulting framework separates four incentive functions—mission-based, administrative-advancement, economic, and career-development incentives—from two sets of conditions: official traits and project location. It also defines an incentive gap between formally announced rewards and the strength perceived by implementing actors. Three mechanisms enlarge that gap: implementation lag, criterion ambiguity, and attribution ambiguity. Nanjing's digital transportation transformation is used as an illustrative case, not as an empirical test. The analysis shows why data sharing, long project horizons, and citywide spillovers can weaken otherwise credible mandates. Six propositions specify when incentive portfolios should motivate cooperation and when they may instead encourage symbolic compliance, project selection, or competition for credit. The framework implies that effective design requires shared contribution records, project-specific evaluation, differentiated incentive portfolios, and shorter feedback cycles.

Compliance-Oriented or Deep Digitalization? A Tripartite Evolutionary Game Analysis of Carbon Mitigation and Pollution Reduction Digital Collaborative Governance

Digitalization is reshaping environmental governance by enabling real-time data collection, information sharing, and coordinated regulatory action. However, how heterogeneous enterprise digitalization modes, compliance-oriented digitalization, and deep digitalization affect multi-actor digital collaborative governance for carbon mitigation and pollution reduction remain underexplored. This study develops a tripartite evolutionary game model involving the government, enterprises, and the public. The model distinguishes enterprises’ digitalization modes and examines how government digital regulation, enterprise carbon mitigation and pollution reduction strategies, and public participation co-evolve under different cost–benefit conditions. Through numerical simulations and theoretical analysis, the study identifies critical factors of stakeholders’ strategies and proposes possible evolution paths for digital collaborative governance. The results show that (1) the system can evolve toward an ideal stable equilibrium: government digital regulation, enterprise carbon mitigation and pollution reduction, and active public participation; there is a high probability that enterprises will adopt a deep level of digitalization. (2) Subsidies for deep digitalization can increase the probability of enterprise deep digitalization, but excessive subsidies may increase fiscal pressure and destabilize government digital regulation. Compared with subsidy intensity, the additional benefits of digital collaborative governance accruing to enterprises are more important in promoting the transition from compliance-oriented to deep digitalization. (3) Public participation and government digital regulation both contribute to the stability of digital collaborative governance. Higher public participation significantly accelerates system convergence, while government digital regulation remains sustainable when digital collaborative governance benefits can offset construction and operating costs. These findings clarify the conditional logic of digital collaborative governance and offer actionable policy implications.

Can the e-commerce platform escape the trap of fake reviews? The evidence from tripartite evolutionary game