Research on the Path to Enhancing Ecological Well-Being Performance Driven by the Digital Economy: A Scenario Analysis Based on Multi-Policy Combinations in the Yellow River Basin

The coordinated advancement of economic growth, ecological resource constraints, and societal well-being is pivotal to achieving high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin. The influence of the digital economy on urban development manifests as systemic, dynamic, and spatially heterogeneous—exhibiting pronounced interurban correlations. This study adopts a dual analytical lens: first, ecological well-being performance—which quantifies the efficiency with which natural resource inputs are converted into improvements in residents’ subjective and objective well-being; and second, ecological common prosperity—which captures equity dimensions in the distribution of ecological benefits across populations and territories. Drawing on system dynamics modeling, we elucidate the underlying mechanisms through which the digital economy shapes ecological well-being performance, simulate evolutionary trajectories of both ecological well-being performance and ecological common prosperity under alternative policy regimes, and identify optimal intervention pathways. Empirical results indicate that the integrated policy scenario combining green welfare enhancement and economic growth-oriented development, with digitally driven and regional cooperation, yields the greatest improvement in ecological well-being performance; the green welfare–focused scenario ranks second. Grounded in regional heterogeneity, we recommend a phased, differentiated implementation strategy—tailored to the developmental stage, endowments, and institutional capacities of individual cities within the basin. Methodologically, this study advances beyond conventional city-centric frameworks by introducing a local–neighborhood coupled simulation model that explicitly accounts for intercity spillovers. Furthermore, our measurement of ecological well-being performance integrates text-based big data analytics—leveraging sentiment lexicons—to robustly capture subjective welfare dimensions, thereby addressing a longstanding limitation in extant literature regarding the operationalization of well-being. Collectively, these contributions provide theoretically grounded, empirically informed insights to support the strategic implementation of ecological conservation and high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin.