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

Abstract

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.