An Inquiry into the Evolutionary Game among Tripartite Entities and Strategy Selection within the Framework of Personal Information Authorization

Mobile applications (Apps) serve as vital conduits for information exchange in the mobile internet era, yet they also engender significant cybersecurity risks due to their real-time handling of vast quantities of data. This manuscript constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model, “users-App providers-government”, to illuminate a pragmatic pathway for orderly information circulation within the App marketplace and sustainable industry development. It then scrutinizes the evolutionary process and emergence conditions of their stabilizing equilibrium strategies and employs simulation analysis via MATLAB. The findings reveal that (1) there exists a high degree of coupling among the strategic selections of the three parties, wherein any alteration in one actor’s decision-making trajectory exerts an impact on the evolutionary course of the remaining two actors. (2) The initial strategies significantly influence the pace of evolutionary progression and its outcome. Broadly speaking, the higher the initial probabilities of users opting for information authorization, App providers adopting compliant data solicitation practices, and the government enforcing stringent oversight, the more facile the attainment of an evolutionarily optimal solution. (3) The strategic preferences of the triadic stakeholders are subject to a composite influence of respective costs, benefits, and losses. Of these, users’ perceived benefits serve as the impetus for their strategic decisions, while privacy concerns act as a deterrent. App providers’ strategy decisions are influenced by a number of important elements, including their corporate reputation and fines levied by the government. Costs associated with government regulations are the main barrier to the adoption of strict supervision practices. Drawing upon these analytical outcomes, we posit several feasible strategies.