The governance of rent-seeking behavior in carbon asset pledge financing: An evolutionary game perspective

As an emerging financing model in the carbon financial market, carbon asset pledge financing (CAPF) has received extensive attention from governments and firms with the advance of low-carbon economy. Since enterprises, banks, third-party carbon asset evaluation agencies (TCAs), governments, etc, are involved in the operation of CAPF, driven by information asymmetry and the interaction among different stakeholders, rent-seeking behavior is easy to occur in CAPF. This paper develops an evolutionary game model to investigate the rent-seeking behavior in CAPF among different stakeholders. In addition, the risk-sharing and penalty mechanisms are also taken into account. Subsequently, we examine the effect of relevant parameters on the dynamic evolution strategy of all parties in CAPF rent-seeking through numerical examples. The results show that the governance of rent-seeking behavior in CAPF needs the cooperation of different participating entities, the improvement of carbon financial market can reduce the occurrence of rent-seeking behavior in CAPF. Compared with firms, TCAs are more susceptible to opportunism. Additionally, both the risk-sharing mechanism and the penalty mechanism can effectively reduce the occurrence of rent-seeking behavior. This paper contributes to the management of CAPF, and managerial insights for the governance of rent-seeking behavior in CAPF are also provided.