Green building technologies adoption process in China: How environmental policies are reshaping the decision-making among alliance-based construction enterprises?

Abstract To expedite green building technologies (GBTs) adoption among construction enterprises, the Chinese government has launched a series of environmental policies that encourage the establishment of green building alliances. By building an evolutionary game optimization model, this study reveals the game strategy changes of multiple stakeholders and the impact of environmental policies on GBTs adoption among alliance-based construction enterprises. On this basis, the case study and simulation method are used to simulate the impact of implementation strength for environmental policies on the decision-making of stakeholders in alliances. The simulation results show that the strength of different environmental policies should reach a certain threshold (over 0.5). Comparatively speaking, the effect of green subsidy policies is usually superior to the impact of environmental tax policies; and the higher the ratio of market participants in the carbon emission trading, the better and more complete the GBTs adoption in alliances. Moreover, a single policy is more affected by the internal environment in alliances, but policy mixes can be most effective to promote GBTs adoption among construction enterprises. Therefore, the combination of environmental taxes, green subsidies and carbon trading will be the better policy instruments to develop GBTs in green building alliances.