What Drives Low‐Carbon Consumption? A Behavioural Diffusion Model Integrating Regret Theory and Evolutionary Game Theory

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🔬研究者:Behavioral diffusion modeling combining regret theory and evolutionary game theory offers a mechanistic understanding of low-carbon adoption dynamics.

🏢実務担当者:Policymakers can use the identified economic threshold and network density conditions to design targeted incentives for low-carbon consumption.

🏛政策担当者:The model highlights that economic incentives must exceed a threshold and social network density must be sufficient for effective policy diffusion.

ABSTRACT Effectively diffusing low‐carbon consumption behaviour throughout society is a critical challenge in advancing the green transition. However, this diffusion process is jointly shaped by multiple factors, including government regulation, boundedly rational psychological responses and social network interactions. To systematically uncover the underlying dynamic mechanisms, this study develops an analytical evolutionary game model based on pair approximation (PA) and validates it through multi‐agent simulations. The main findings are as follows. First, a clear economic threshold governs whether low‐carbon consumption can be widely adopted. When the consumption cost is lower than the combined effect of governmental incentives and penalties, the system converges toward full adoption. Agent‐based simulation results reveal pronounced phase transition behaviour near this critical point, which is highly consistent with the theoretical predictions of the PA framework; phase diagrams and sensitivity analyses further confirm the robustness of this threshold. Second, economic factors determine the long‐term equilibrium outcome of policy diffusion, whereas weak low‐carbon policies tend to be ineffective in practice. In contrast, social interaction and psychological perception primarily affect the diffusion rate rather than the final equilibrium. Moreover, a minimum threshold of social network density exists, below which effective diffusion remains difficult even under strong economic incentives. Third, the diffusion process exhibits pronounced path dependence. The adoption rate may evolve along trajectories characterised by local lock‐in effects and hysteresis loops. Overall, this study clarifies the hierarchical roles of economic, social and psychological factors in behavioural diffusion from a mechanistic perspective. It offers new insights into the social propagation patterns underlying the ‘difficulty of initiation’ and ‘reversal’ observed in low‐carbon promotion, thereby providing valuable guidance for the design of precise and effective policy interventions.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.70074first seen 2026-05-17 06:03:25 · last seen 2026-05-20 05:10:21