Synergistic evolution of multi-stakeholder strategies in the promotion of green building materials, quadrilateral evolutionary game and system dynamics

Purpose Sustained urbanization poses challenges to decarbonizing the building sector, which can be addressed through the adoption of green building materials (GBMs). The purpose of this research is to refine regulatory measures to facilitate the promotion of GBMs by multi-stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach A quadrilateral evolutionary game model involving the government, building materials enterprises (BMEs), building developers (BDs) and building consumers (BCs) is developed. The Lyapunov first method is utilized to analyze evolutionarily stable strategies. System dynamics simulations are conducted to assess the impact of game parameters. Findings The findings demonstrate that the evolutionarily stable strategy of the quadrilateral game is that the government chooses strong supervision, BMEs choose green production, BDs choose green development, and BCs choose green consumption. Increasing stakeholders' initial green preferences, adjusting government subsidies and penalties, reducing GBMs’ certification costs, enhancing BCs' perceived benefits of GBMs and carbon inclusion, optimizing stakeholders’ risk avoidance and perceived bias of gains and losses, allocating properly more synergy gains to BMEs and increasing the proportion of non-green stakeholders' loss in non-synergized states promote green synergy evolution. Research limitations/implications The implications suggest increasing initial green preferences for BMEs and BDs based on industry alliances, imposing appropriate incentives and constraints through subsidies and taxes, improving certification mechanisms for GBMs and reducing certification costs, empowering BCs on the demand side to increase the implicit perceived value of GBMs, adjusting stakeholders’ perceived biases of gains and losses through publicity and properly allocating more synergy gains to BMEs and providing support to enterprises that prioritize green. Originality/value This research innovatively constructs a quadrilateral evolutionary game model integrated with system dynamics, considers perceived bias in stakeholders' decision-making using prospect theory, contributes to the field by expanding the application of evolutionary game theory and system dynamics and offers recommendations for the promotion of GBMs.