How to promote municipal household waste management by waste classification and recycling? A stochastic tripartite evolutionary game analysis

Municipal household waste management (MHWM) is crucial for urban governance and sustainable development. Currently, Chinese governments at all levels are making great effort to implement MHWM through waste classification and recycling (WCR). However, the major participants in WCR, such as urban residents, property management companies and government departments, may act in their self-interest and hinder the MHWM goals. Therefore, it has become an imperative initiative to promote MHWM by effectively coordinate their conflicts of interest. Considering that external factors with complexity and uncertainty may also affect participants' behaviors, we develop a stochastic tripartite evolutionary game to model behavioral interaction of the three participants. Then we derive theoretical results and simulate different scenarios to examine the effects 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 have different incentive effects. Moreover, credit-based punishment and disclosure of non-compliance are more effective than financial-based penalty. To promote MHWM, policymakers should not only simplify classification rules, lower participation cost and enhance credit-based punishment system, but also encourage anonymous report and apply well-designed financial-based incentive and penalty.