ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1640294
This article is part of the Research TopicEnvironment and Healthcare, a two-way traffic: Challenges, Impacts, and Sustainable SolutionsView all 4 articles
Game Theoretic Research on Strategies for Medical Carbon Neutrality Stakeholders under Time Delay Effects
Provisionally accepted
- 1Business School and MBA Education Center, Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China
- 2University of Reading Henley Business School, Reading, United Kingdom
- 3The First Affiliated Hospital of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China
- 4School of Business Administration, Henan University of Economics and Law, Zhengzhou, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
As global climate change intensifies, the healthcare industry's carbon emissions have gained increasing attention. Achieving carbon neutrality in healthcare is crucial for sustainable development. This paper constructs a dynamic decision-making model based on evolutionary game theory, involving four parties: government, public hospitals, pharmaceutical enterprises, and the public. The model incorporates time delay factors to analyze the evolutionary paths under various incentives and constraints. Through stability analysis and MATLAB simulations, the impact of key parameters—such as government regulatory costs, hospital short-term interests, corporate fines, reputational incentives, and public participation costs—on system equilibrium is explored. The findings reveal that: (1) Strict government regulation is constrained by cost and credibility; regulatory costs should be reduced, and credibility enhanced via market-based carbon trading and information-based regulation. (2) Public hospitals' weak enforcement is driven by short-term profit motivations, requiring stronger financial incentives and penalties. (3) Pharmaceutical enterprises' self-discipline can be improved by increasing fines, boosting reputational incentives, and expanding public scrutiny channels. (4) Public participation significantly influences carbon neutrality outcomes, necessitating optimization of online participation mechanisms and dynamic adjustment of compensation ratios. Time delays accelerate system convergence but do not alter the evolutionary direction. These findings provide both theoretical and practical insights into improving healthcare carbon neutrality policies.
Keywords: medical carbon neutrality, Medical supply chain, public health policy, four-partyevolutionary game, Time delay
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 12 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xie, Gao, Cheng, Niu and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yingying Cheng, Business School and MBA Education Center, Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.