Research on farmers’ decision-making mechanism for the adoption of agricultural green production technologies: an evolutionary game analysis

Abstract

The adoption of Agricultural Green Production Technologies (AGPT) by farmers is a complex and dynamic process involving multiple stakeholders, whose active participation is essential for promoting the diffusion and adoption of AGPT. This study incorporates government, banks, farmers, and agricultural technology service providers into a unified analytical framework and develops a four-party evolutionary game model to examine their strategic interactions and the evolutionary dynamics of AGPT adoption. Numerical simulations are conducted to investigate the evolutionary trajectories and equilibrium outcomes of the four stakeholders under different parameter settings. The results identify four possible evolutionary equilibrium states corresponding to different strategic combinations among the stakeholders. Government subsidies and the additional benefit coefficient of agricultural technology service providers are found to be important factors affecting farmers’ AGPT adoption decisions. In particular, changes in government subsidies alter farmers’ adoption incentives, while changes in the additional benefits of agricultural technology service providers can influence farmers’ decisions through the interdependent payoff structures among stakeholders. These findings demonstrate that AGPT adoption is not determined by farmers’ individual incentives alone but emerges from the strategic interactions and benefit structures of multiple stakeholders. Based on these findings, targeted policy recommendations and managerial implications are proposed to facilitate the diffusion and adoption of AGPT.