The role of rural cooperatives in the development of rural household photovoltaics: An evolutionary game study

Abstract

Promoting photovoltaics (PV) in rural households is a crucial step towards green development and rural revitalization. The current practice negatively affects the profit margins of rural households, creating a challenge in balancing efficiency and equity. This paper utilizes evolutionary game theory to construct a bipartite evolutionary game model involving enterprise and rural households, and a tripartite model involving enterprise, rural households, and rural PV cooperatives. We then investigate the strategic behavior and choices of stakeholders and examine the evolutionary trajectory of the system under different parameters based on numerical simulations. Results show that the rural PV cooperatives can increase the strategic choices of enterprises by reducing their market entry costs. The rural PV cooperatives also increase the expected profits of enterprises, rural households, and total social welfare. Our findings suggest that rural PV cooperatives may encourage the adoption of rural household PV and provide insights to balance efficiency and equity.