Evolutionary game analysis on behavioral strategies of multiple stakeholders in E-waste recycling industry

Abstract In order to study the sustainable development of the e-waste recycling industry in China, more attention has been paid to the behavior evolutions and strategic choices of the multi-participants. This paper presents a tripartite evolutionary game model consisted of the government, the recycler and the consumer, determines the payoff matrices of the system and calculates the replicator dynamic equation of each participant. We obtain the evolutionary stability strategies of the system and analyze their stability conditions. Some numerical simulations on three optimal evolutionary stability strategies of the industry development are used to verify the rationality of the model. We focus on multiple evolutionary stability strategies of the game model corresponding to different stages of industry development. The results show that the government should play a leading role in the development of the e-waste recycling industry. In the initial stage, the government should increase the subsidy for the recycler, increase the penalty on unqualified disassembly and properly control the cost of supervision. The government adjusts the reward-penalty-supervision joint mechanism to promote the e-waste recycling industry to develop into the middle stage. In the middle stage, the government should control the subsidy level to avoid over high financial burden from decreasing its supervision passion, while avoiding over low incentive from decreasing the recycler’s enthusiasm. The recycler should actively attach importance to the construction of collection channel, reduce collection cost and control the extra investment of upgrading dismantling. Adequate subsidy helps guide the consumer to choose green strategy, while the consumer should not always overestimate the residual values of used products in their hands and pay more attention to the environmentally sound treatment of used products. In the mature stage, the consumer actively protects environment and the recycler actively collects and disassembles the e-waste with compliance, thereby the government gradually relaxes the supervision and finally withdraws from the market.