A game theory analysis of promoting the spongy city construction at the building and community scale

Sponge city has been promoted by China as a strategy for cities to cope with stormwater disasters and achieve sustainable water management. The success of the strategy, particularly at the building and community scale, largely rests with the active participation of real estate developers. However, the issue that how to encourage the active participation of developers is underexplored. To fill the gap, we provide an evolutionary game model to study how governments can regulate developers so as to promote sponge city construction at the building and community scale (SCCBCs). Through the strategies interaction and evolution analysis between local governments and developers at different stages of market development, we find that strong regulations for developers are ineffective at the introduction stage and inefficient at the mature stage. At the growth stage, proper regulations are needed to make high-level SCCBCs become developers' relative advantage strategy to achieve significant development. Our analysis of policy optimization at the growth stage shows that the payoff quantity based and payment pattern-based interventions both help to design and optimize appropriate regulations to promote high-levels SCCBCs. These findings are of great value to promote the sponge city construction in China as well as other countries with similar contexts. They are also of great significance to the development of products with spillover effect like SCCBCs and related regulation practices.