Evolutionary game analysis and stability control scenarios of coal mine safety inspection system in China based on system dynamics

Abstract

In the process of coal mining safety inspection in China, the different interests and influences of stakeholders and their complicated dynamic interactions make the coal mining safety laws and regulations less effective. Moreover, the existing literature on China’s coal mining safety inspection is short of research on revealling the dynamic interactions that can occur under the bounded rationality and also on proposals for effective interactions that will lead to improved safety outcomes. Therefore, this paper explores the use of evolutionary game theory to describe the interactions between the stakeholders in China’s coal mining safety inspection system, which includes the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety (SACMS), the Local Regulation Departments of Coal Mine Safety (LRDCMS), and coal enterprises. Moreover, the paper also explores dynamic simulations of the evolutionary game model to analyze the stability of stakeholder interactions and to identify equilibrium solutions. The simulation results show that the strategy selections of the three stakeholders fluctuate repeatedly, which indicates that the evolutionary stable strategy does not exist in the current interactions between the stakeholders. Therefore, the dynamic penalty control scenario and an optimized dynamic penalty-incentive control scenario were proposed to control the fluctuations and then simulated again. And the simulation results indicated that the dynamic penalty control scenario can effectively restrain the fluctuations and make stakeholder interactions more stable. Furthermore, the optimized dynamic penalty-incentive control scenario can not only restrain the fluctuations effectively but also present an ideal evolutionary stable strategy in which coal enterprises could nearly choose safety production as their optimal strategy.