China's energy whistleblowing and energy supervision policy: An evolutionary game perspective

In order to study the energy supervision system of China, whistleblowers have been innovatively introduced into the game in this paper, and a tripartite evolutionary game model comprising of regulators, energy enterprises, and whistleblowers has been constructed. After solving the equilibrium points and the evolutionary stable strategy of each agent by the replicator dynamics equation, this paper has conducted a policy simulation on two evolutionary stable points in real life - strong supervision, active management, not blow the whistle and strong supervision, active management, blow the whistle. The results show that the initial probabilities of the tripartite game strategies will affect the time length and convergence speed of system evolution, but will not affect the overall trend and final result of the evolution. At the same time, there is a significant correlation between the probability of whistleblowing, probability of active management by energy enterprises and the probability of strong supervision. The percentage of false whistleblowing will also affect regulatory cost and management efficiency. While incorporating whistleblowing into their decision making, energy regulators should also take proper measures to increase the percentage of true whistleblowing on energy issues by the public, and urge energy enterprises to actively address the issues reported. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.