Smart transition pathways and development incentive mechanism of China’s smart community elderly care industry under market dominance: Considering a multi-subjective behavior game

Abstract

Against the backdrop of an aging population, China is actively experimenting with an innovative elderly care model, so smart community elderly care has recently received widespread attention. However, the results of the implementation of the model have not yet met the expectation due to the variety of interests among the relevant participants. In this study, we identified the most core stakeholders in smart community elderly care, developed a four-party evolutionary game model including local governments, communities, service supply enterprises and households with elderly members. By applying the system dynamics method, we simulate the evolutionary paths and explore the complex interactions at the multiparticipant level in order to facilitate the transition of community elderly care services from traditional to smart, and then propose managerial insights for accelerating the construction of smart community elderly care. The results suggest that: (1) the four players in the game influence each other and are intimately related, and the benign interaction between them will further stimulate the vitality of the smart community elderly care industry; (2) appropriate improvement in policy support will strongly promote smart community elderly care, and the incentive effect on the demand side (households with elderly members) is more significant; (3) when households’ preference for smart services increases, and the perceived value to communities and enterprises reaches a certain threshold, communities and enterprises will actively adopt smart solution and technology as well as develop stable portfolio strategy; (4) measures such as simultaneously increasing the level of smart and resource synergy will promote the system evolution toward smart services, and the system is more sensitive to the internal behavior of the enterprise than the external behavior between community and enterprise.