Collaborative Governance of Circular Reverse Supply Chains from the Perspective of Cooperative Innovation: A Numerical Application to Waste Mobile Phones

Abstract

As urban mining plays an increasingly important role in resource security and sustainable development, insufficient coordination among reverse supply chain participants has become a major constraint on the efficient recovery of urban mineral resources. From the perspective of interfirm cooperative innovation, this study takes waste mobile phones as an application context and develops a four-party evolutionary game model involving the government, recyclers, remanufacturers, and consumers. The model incorporates opportunistic behavior in cooperative innovation, government subsidy intensity, and product pricing into a unified analytical framework. Replicator dynamics, Jacobian-based stability analysis, and numerical simulations are employed to examine the evolutionary mechanisms and stability conditions of multi-actor collaborative governance. The results identify four stable equilibrium configurations and show that: (1) excessive innovation spillovers and asymmetric interdependence between recyclers and remanufacturers may weaken incentive compatibility and induce opportunistic behavior; (2) the effects of government subsidies vary across evolutionary stages and depend on the strategic responses of other actors; and (3) interfirm transfer prices and final market prices promote stable cooperation only within specific ranges. These findings provide a theoretical basis and policy implications for improving collaborative governance in reverse supply chains for urban mineral resource recovery and supporting sustainable urban mining.