Behavioral decision-making of government, agricultural product producers, and consumers on agricultural product quality and safety regulation in a digital environment

The quality and safety of agricultural products are related to people’s lives and health, economic development, and social stability, and have always been a hot issue of concern to the government and society. The rapid development of digital traceability technology in the digital environment has brought new opportunities for the supervision of agricultural product quality and safety, but the frequent occurrence of agricultural product safety incidents in recent years has exposed many problems such as the lack of governmental supervision, unstandardized production process of enterprises, and weak consumer awareness. To improve the cooperation efficiency of stakeholders and ensure the quality and safety of agricultural products, this paper proposes a dynamic model based on evolutionary game theory. The model incorporates the government, agricultural product producers, and farmers, and evaluates the stability and effectiveness of the system under different circumstances. The results of the study show that there are multiple evolutionary stabilization strategies in the tripartite evolutionary game model of agricultural product quality and safety supervision, and there are corresponding evolutionary stabilization conditions. There are several factors affecting the stability of the system, the most important of which are government regulation, severe penalties for agricultural product producers, and incentives. When these factors reach a certain threshold, the stakeholder cooperation mechanism can establish an evolutionarily stable strategy. This study contributes to the understanding of the operational mechanism of stakeholder cooperation in agricultural product quality and safety regulation in the digital environment and provides decision support and policy recommendations for stakeholders to promote the sustainable development and optimization of agricultural product quality and safety regulation.