Simulation of Coupling Coordination and Resilience in Regional Economies and Information Network Institutions: The Case of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Urban Agglomeration

In the context of high-quality urbanization, a key challenge for urban agglomerations is the structural mismatch between economic linkages and rapidly expanding information interactions, which may constrain the performance of coupled systems under shocks. Taking the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH) urban agglomeration as a case, we construct an inter-city economic network from cross-city corporate investment ties and an information network from online attention flows, and further derive an economic–information coupled network using a coupling-coordination framework. Using social network analysis and resilience assessment (hierarchy, assortativity, clustering, and disruption simulations), we compare network structures in 2013 and 2023 and evaluate how the structural gap shapes coupled resilience. Results show that (i) economic ties strengthen steadily but moderately, whereas the information network expands faster and becomes more inclusive, widening the structural gap between “virtual” and “material” flows; (ii) despite a persistently high correlation between the two layers, coordination declines, indicating increasing local divergence in link organization; and (iii) resilience improves overall, but differentiation remains: the information network gains robustness through decentralization and redundancy, while the economic network is more sensitive to targeted removals of core nodes, and the coupled network exhibits intermediate performance. These findings suggest that enhancing BTH resilience requires strengthening cross-jurisdictional redundant links and reducing excessive dependence on core corridors to better translate information interactions into balanced economic connectivity.