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Article

Evolutionary Game Analysis of Solid Waste Emission Supervision under the Green Credit Policy

Fulei Shi ORCID ,  Zisha Zhou ORCID ,  Jintong Wang ORCID

    Received: 12 August 2025; Revised: 11 November 2025; Accepted: 18 November 2025; Published: 25 November 2025

    Abstract

    Under the "dual carbon" targets, the governance of industrial solid waste emissions increasingly requires policy instruments that combine environmental enforcement with financial incentives. Existing green-credit studies mainly examine policy effects or static strategic equilibria, while paying limited attention to whether a regulatory game can endogenously converge when certification costs adjust with market participation. To address this gap, this paper develops a two-agent evolutionary game model between government regulators and solid-waste-emitting enterprises under a green credit policy. We first compare the strategic dynamics under a static certification cost and a dynamic certification cost mechanism. Theoretical analysis shows that, when certification cost is fixed, the interior equilibrium is only a center with periodic oscillations rather than an evolutionarily stable strategy, so the regulatory system lacks a self-stabilizing mechanism. By contrast, when certification cost rises with the proportion of enterprises applying for green credit, the Jacobian matrix at the interior equilibrium has a negative trace and a positive determinant, making the equilibrium asymptotically stable. This reveals a certification-cost-based convergence mechanism: dynamic verification costs can dampen strategic oscillations caused by subsidy dependence and greenwashing risk. Numerical simulation further confirms that penalties, supervision costs, emission-reduction costs, baseline certification costs, and green-credit operating returns jointly determine the stable adoption and supervision probabilities. The study contributes to the green credit and environmental regulation literature by transforming certification cost from an exogenous parameter into an endogenous stabilizing policy variable and by explaining how green credit can coordinate industrial emission control through both incentive and convergence effects.

    Keywords

    References

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