Paradigm shifts and the interplay between state, business and civil sectors

Abstract

The recent rise of the civil sector as a main player of socio-political actions, next to public and private sectors, has largely increased the complexity underlying the interplay between different sectors of our society. From urban planning to global governance, analysis of these complex interactions requires new mathematical and computational approaches. Here, we develop a novel framework, grounded on evolutionary game theory, to envisage situations in which each of these sectors is confronted with the dilemma of deciding between maintaining a status quo scenario or shifting towards a new paradigm. We consider multisector conflicts regarding environmentally friendly policies as an example of application, but the framework developed here has a considerably broader scope. We show that the public sector is crucial in initiating the shift, and determine explicitly under which conditions the civil sector—reflecting the emergent reality of civil society organizations playing an active role in modern societies—may influence the decision-making processes accruing to other sectors, while fostering new routes towards a paradigm shift of the society as a whole. Our results are shown to be robust to a wide variety of assumptions and model parametrizations.

Paths to the adoption of electric vehicles: An evolutionary game theoretical approach

“…In this case, the system will ultimately stabilize in state CCC. The trajectories in Figure 3 also show that combining different mechanisms (policy instruments) can contribute to speed up EV adoption, in accordance with empirical research on environmental policy performance (Daugbjerg and Sønderskov 2012) -see also (Encarnação et al 2016). Figure 3.…”

“…Following (Encarnação et al 2016), we consider three populations: the public, private and civil sectors. The public sector represents government entities, the private sector businesses that produce and/or sell vehicles and the civil sector represents consumers.…”

“…As in (Encarnação et al 2016), we assume two mechanisms of strategy update: imitation and mutation. A mutation is said to occur whenever an individual adopts, spontaneously and without resorting to any imitation process, a new strategy.…”

“…Our analysis can be considerably simplified whenever we adopt the well-known small mutation approximation (Fudenberg and Imhof 2006) adapted for a multi-sector paradigm (Encarnação et al 2016). In this way we reduce the state space under analysis, while still keeping vital information regarding the overall dynamics in the full-state space.…”

“…interests produces an incentive landscape that is often challenging to analyze in a systematic way, despite its pervasiveness (Encarnação et al 2016;Santos et al 2016). Furthermore, individual preferences across different sectors are dynamically intertwined, as they are influenced by the actions performed, in a given moment, by the representatives of all other sectors.…”