How to Promote Municipal Household Waste Management by Waste Classification and Recycling? A Stochastic Tripartite Evolutionary Game Analysis

Municipal household waste management (MHWM) is of great importance for both urban governance and sustainable development. Currently, Chinese governments at all levels are making great effort to implement MHWM by waste classification and recycling (WCR). However, the pursuit of self-interest by participants (i.e., urban residents, property management companies and government departments) involved in WCR often makes it difficult to achieve desired goals of MHWM. Considering that external factors with complexity and uncertainty may also affect behaviors of participants, we develop a stochastic tripartite evolutionary game to model behavior interaction of the above three participants. Then we conduct a detailed theoretical derivation and multi-scenario numerical simulation to investigate the impacts of key factors on participants’ strategy evolution. The results show that, stochastic interference, cost reduction and rules simplification contribute to WCR of MHWM, and reward and performance improvement benefits presents a differential incentive effect. In addition, credit-based punishment and disclosure of non-compliance are more powerful than financial-based penalty. To promote MHWM, policymakers should not only consider classification rules simplification, participation cost reduction and credit-based punishment system perfection, but also encourage anonymous report and implement well-directed financial-based incentive and penalty