The Influence of Social Preference and Governments’ Strong Reciprocity on Agricultural Green Production Networks under Intensive Management in China

Abstract

This paper focuses on the sustainable development path of agricultural production in China under the pattern of intensive management, which aims to promote the agricultural green production networks consisting of new agricultural operators and traditional farmers. Based on these, this paper explores the evolution of agricultural green production networks through analyzing three interactive relationships among new agricultural operators and traditional farmers and constructing evolutionary game models on complex networks considering social preference and governments’ strong reciprocity, respectively. Then, the evolutionary stability strategies of these six evolutionary game models are analyzed, and the simulation of the evolution process of agricultural green production networks in different scenarios by MATLAB are realized. The results show that: (1) The evolutionary results of agricultural green production networks are positively correlated with the extra net profit of agricultural production operators. (2) If the extra net profit is positive, traditional farmers are more likely to adopt stable strategy of agricultural green production than new agricultural operators, while a few new agricultural operators would like to adopt the strategy of agricultural green production even though the extra net profit is low or negative. (3) The effect of social preference and governments’ strong reciprocity shows heterogeneity on the emergence of agricultural green production networks. When the net profit is enhanced, agricultural production operators with competitive preference would adopt the strategy of agricultural green production more quickly, as well as those agricultural production operators with social preference as governments’ strong reciprocity strengthened. As such, this paper suggests that it should be necessary to improve the net profit of agricultural green production by reducing costs and increasing benefits, encouraging agricultural production operators to cooperate in the agricultural green production networks to learn and share their green production experience.