Evolutionary Game Analysis of Government and Enterprise Behavior Strategies in Public-Private-Partnership Farmland Consolidation

Abstract

To improve the implementation effect of farmland consolidation (FC) and promote the development of agricultural modernization, the Chinese government has vigorously promoted the application of the public-private-partnership for farmland consolidation (PPP-FC). However, many conflicts of interest among stakeholders exist in PPP-FC. Especially in the implementation stage of PPP-FC, most private enterprises probably prefer to decrease the costs of construction to increase the profits when government incentives and supervision are insufficient. Based on this, this paper constructs an evolutionary game model between the government and the enterprises to explore the motivations of the enterprises’ speculative behaviors, the interaction mechanism and the evolutionary stability strategies of both parties and uses numerical simulations to visually analyze the effectiveness of the incentive mechanism and the strategic change of both sides. Our results show that (1) the enterprise’s farmland operating income is the decisive factor that affects behavioral choices: the situation for the income of a low-effort strategy is greater than that of a high-effort strategy is the root cause of speculative behavior; (2) the incentive mechanism can simultaneously affect the decision-making direction and speed of both the government and the enterprises, especially punishment which can effectively regulate the behaviors of the enterprises; (3) government regulation costs and officials’ desire for promotion are important factors affecting their strategic choices: regulation costs negatively impact the government’s plans to adopt an incentive strategy and the promotion desire positively promotes the government implementing incentive measures for the enterprises; and (4) the supervision level of farmers is an important factor that affects the strategic choices of both the government and the enterprises: farmers supervision is an effective remedy for inadequate government regulation and constrains the government’s behavior. Finally, the paper proposes corresponding policy recommendations to improve the implementation effect of PPP-FC and also provides an important reference for other developing countries to formulate PPP-FC incentive mechanisms.