Toward sustaining the development of green residential buildings in China: A tripartite evolutionary game analysis

Abstract

Green residential buildings (GRBs) are of instructive significance to the sustainable transformation of the construction industry. Yet, it is far from the case that the development of GRBs in China has been sustained toward a long-term autonomy-oriented goal from reliance on the government's efforts, which remains an area requiring more scholarly attention. Considering the strategic choices of key stakeholders that dominate the GRB market, this study innovatively introduced industry associations and idle penalty to establish a tripartite evolutionary game model involving the government, developer, and homebuyer to investigate the evolution process of the dynamic system. Then, equilibrium points and evolutionary stable strategies were analyzed. Finally, collaborative players' decision-making behavior and their sensitivity to critical factors in each stage were illustrated through numerical simulations. The results indicate the leading role of the government in the incubation stage, while such leadership effects are gradually replaced by market-led mechanisms as the GRB industry matures. In addition, appropriate subsidies and penalties can benefit the GRB development when dynamically fitting respective stages and high cost obstructs the government's initiative for the GRB market. Accordingly, a series of promotion mechanisms are proposed to afford theoretical guidance and managerial implications to prompt the long-term development of GRBs more effectively. • Autonomy-oriented transformation of the GRB industry is essential to sustaining its long-term development. • A tripartite evolutionary game model was established to analyze three stakeholders' strategies in the dynamic system. • Industry associations were innovatively introduced to explore the role of social supervision in the GRB market. • The idle penalty mechanism was introduced to examine its regulatory effects on opportunistic behavior of the developer. • A series of promotion mechanisms of the GRB industry were proposed in relation to different evolutionary processes.