Effectiveness research on the multi-player evolutionary game of coal-mine safety regulation in China based on system dynamics

Abstract Coal-mine safety regulation is an important approach to ensure safe production in the mining industry. The existing literature on China’s coal-mine safety regulation focuses mainly on statically analysing the game between two stakeholders and neglects the dynamic process of game playing under bounded rationality. Moreover, when there are a number of coal-mining enterprises, there are different interest demands between them in the context of regulation. Therefore, this paper explores the use of evolutionary game theory to describe the long-term dynamic process of multi-player game playing in coal-mine safety regulation under the condition of bounded rationality. Furthermore, the multi-player evolutionary game is simulated by adopting system dynamics to analyse the implementation effect of different penalty strategies on the game process and game equilibrium. The simulation results are as follows. First, when the penalty strategy is static payment, the strategy selections of the stakeholders fluctuate repeatedly. Moreover, increasing the penalties can quickly control the occurrence of coal-mine enterprises’ illegal behaviours in the short term, but in the long term, it can increase the fluctuation of coal-mine enterprises’ illegal behaviours and make the game process more difficult to control. Second, when the penalty strategy is dynamic payment, the dynamic penalty strategy can effectively restrain the fluctuations existing in the game play and stabilize the game, reducing the safety risks caused by uncertainty. Moreover, the stable state and equilibrium values are not affected by the initial value changes. The application of system dynamics when simulating the multi-player game process is an effective way to analyse the implementation effects of different penalty strategies, which provides a more effective solution to the study of complex multi-player game problems.