How to Promote Logistics Enterprises to Participate in Reverse Emergency Logistics: A Tripartite Evolutionary Game Analysis

Considering the emergency risks and uncertainties of emergency recycling processes, this research builds a tripartite evolutionary game model of government, logistics enterprises, and environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to study the interaction mechanism. Based on the analysis of evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), this research uses MATLAB R2018b to mainly show the strategy choice trends of logistics enterprises in various scenarios including “Government Failure”, as well as the mutual impacts of government and environmental NGOs’ strategy selection. The research found that (1) the government has an important role in efficiently promoting logistics enterprises’ participation; (2) the net benefits of logistics enterprises and environmental NGOs, as key factors that directly affect the game results, are influenced by emergency risks and uncertainty, respectively; (3) environmental NGOs not only play an effective complementary role to government functions, including in the “Government Failure” context, but can also urge the government to perform regulatory functions. This research enriches the study in the field of the combination of evolutionary game theory and reverse emergency logistics as well as providing a reference for the government in developing economic and administrative policies to optimize the recycling and disposal of emergency relief.