Tripartite Evolutionary Game and Simulation Analysis of Regulating Service Value Realization: A Case Study of Yunnan Province, China
Abstract
The sustainable provision of regulating services—such as climate regulation, water purification, and soil conservation—is fundamental to both ecological integrity and human well-being, yet the market mechanisms required to sustain their value remain critically underdeveloped. To explore the sustainable process of realizing the value of regulating services, this study introduces three stakeholders—environmental protection enterprises, the government, and residents—and constructs an evolutionary game model to analyze the behavioral decisions of each stakeholder and the key factors influencing system equilibrium. To validate the theoretical model, we further employed MATLAB R2023a to conduct simulation analyses using a real-world case study and data from Yunnan Province, examining the impact of various variables on the outcomes of the evolutionary game. The following results were obtained: (1) Multiple equilibrium solutions exist within the evolutionary game system, indicating that there is no single path to realizing the value of regulating services. Among these, full government support is key to realizing the value of regulating services. (2) A critical parameter exists in the multi-party game for realizing the value of regulating services, and this parameter exhibits a significant threshold effect; once the threshold is exceeded, the behavioral decisions of the participating actors will change. (3) The long-term sustainable realization of the value of regulating services requires multi-stakeholder collaboration. The contributions of this study lie in expanding the scope of research on the realization of ecosystem service value, strengthening the proactivity of participating stakeholders within the framework of sustainable value realization, overcoming the limitations of traditional static equilibrium analysis, and revealing the evolutionary conditions for the sustainable realization of the value of regulating services.