Analysis on Decision‐Making Changes of Multilevel Governments and Influencing Factors in Watershed Ecological Compensation

Abstract

Watershed ecological compensation has been widely accepted as a system to promote the cooperation of various stakeholders to solve the problem of transboundary water pollution, but the existing research does not fully consider the impact of compensation fee paid by different governments on stakeholders’ decision‐making. Therefore, this paper constructs a tripartite game model between upstream governments, downstream governments, and the central government by using evolutionary game theory and determines the influence of different factors on the decision‐making process of each player through simulation. The results show the following: (1) the initial probability significantly affects the decision‐making behavior of each player; (2) daily supervision of the central government and the reduction of the environmental protection cost can promote the implementation of watershed ecological compensation; (3) the fine to downstream governments makes the decisions of the central government and downstream governments change periodically; and (4) the increase of ecological compensation fee urges downstream governments to choose noncompensation, and compensation fee paid by the central government has a critical value.