Abstract

Government–enterprise collaboration does not automatically produce responsibility sharing in digital environmental governance. Integrating Social Role Theory with evolutionary game theory, this study constructs a role-based evolutionary game model to examine how governments and enterprises adjust responsibility strategies under bounded rationality. The model incorporates legitimacy benefits, role-deviation losses, digital governance capacity, compliance costs, penalties, and governance costs. Results show two possible stable outcomes—mutual responsibility fulfillment and mutual shirking—with threshold-sensitive dynamics. Stronger digital capacity, detection probability, penalties, and legitimacy incentives, combined with lower costs, expand the attraction basin of mutual responsibility fulfillment; weak monitoring, high costs, insufficient penalties, and ambiguous boundaries increase shirking risk. A focused VRBG mechanism—value cultivation, responsibility identification, benefit sharing, and guarantee mechanisms—is proposed to adjust the incentive conditions that make responsibility fulfillment self-reinforcing.

Keywords