How to escape the dilemma of charging infrastructure construction? A multi-sectorial stochastic evolutionary game model

Highlights: • A multi-agent stochastic evolutionary game model with charging infrastructure adoption is constructed. • Simulation with real-world values of game parameters for the case of Shanghai. • Parameters sensitivity to the strategy adoption are discussed by computational experiments. • Civil's strategy adoption has directional differences under two scenarios of charging infrastructure construction. • It's time to consider eliminating the subsidy for EVs because of the lock-in state of civil cooperation. Providing effective charging infrastructure is an essential step in popularizing electric vehicles, which is conductive to improving pollution induced by traditional fuel vehicles and thus improving the environmental sustainability. The most crucial factor in escaping the dilemma of charging infrastructure construction lies in the synergies of multi-sectorial. This paper develops a stochastic evolutionary game model grounded on the strategy adoption of charging infrastructure construction involving governments (public), companies (private), and consumers (civil). We collect the data of Shanghai for simulation to compare the influence of strategy adoption. Our findings suggest that ⅰ) unlike the public and civil sector, in the current situation, the private sector will adopt the defector strategy quickly and lock in the defection state as time goes on; ⅱ) the additional cost effect caused by public-civil co-construction scenario is significant positive to the public sector but almost no impact on the civil sector; ⅲ) civil's strategy adoption has directional differences under two cost sharing scenarios (private-civil and public-civil) of charging infrastructures construction. In the private-civil scenario, if the cost of charging infrastructures construction is transferred to the civil sector, not only will it not change the private-sectorial defection state, but it will also cause civil sector to shift from cooperation to defection. However, at the same sharing ratio of the public-civil scenario, the civil sector is still willing to cooperate. ⅳ) reducing incentives of electric vehicles or increasing costs of internal combustion engine vehicles is necessary, which will not change the lock-in cooperation state of civil sector, and it can improve the cooperation willingness of publicsector.