The Impact of Penalty and Subsidy Mechanisms On The Decisions of Governments, Businesses, and Consumers During COVID-19 ——Tripartite Evolutionary Game Theory Analysis

Abstract Purpose – Based on the fact that punishment and subsidy mechanisms affect the anti-epidemic incentives of major participants in a society, the issue of this paper is how the penalty and subsidy mechanisms affect the decisions of governments, businesses, and consumers during Corona Virus Disease 2019. The goal of this paper is to understand strategic selections from governments, enterprises, and consumers to maximize their respective utility during Corona Virus Disease 2019, and the impact of penalty and subsidy mechanism on the decisions of governments, businesses, and consumers.Design/Methodology/approach - This paper proposes a tripartite evolutionary game theory, involving governments, businesses, and consumers, to firstly analyze the evolutionary stable strategies and to secondly analyze the impact of penalty and subsidy mechanism on their strategy selection during Corona Virus Disease 2019. Thirdly, this paper uses numerical analysis to simulate the strategy formation process of governments, enterprises, and consumers in Japan and India based on their different penalty and subsidy mechanism.Findings – This paper suggests that there are four evolutionarily stable strategies corresponding to the actual anti-epidemic situations of different countries in reality. We find that different subsidy and penalty mechanisms lead to different evolutionary stable strategies. If governments, enterprises, and consumers fighting the pandemic together, the government need to set a low subsidy mechanism and a high penalty mechanism.Originality/value - There are some limitations in the literature, such as long term strategies, rational hypothesis, and convergence path analysis in higher dimensional evolutionary game theory. This paper fills the gap and extends the theory of COVID-19 management theory. Firstly, this paper has important practical significance. This paper finds out the long-term equilibrium strategies of governments, businesses, and consumers under Corona Virus Disease 2019, which can provide an important theoretical and decision-making basis for pandemic prevention and control. Secondly, our paper extends the analytical paradigm of the tripartite evolutionary game theory. We extend the analysis of the dynamic process from the initial point to the convergence point and make a theoretical contribution to the development of high-dimensional evolutionary game theory.