Strategic Interaction and Institutional Change: A Game-Theoretic Model of Industry–Education Integration in China

This study investigates the dynamic evolution of industry–education integration in vocational education from a game-theoretic perspective. Although prior studies have established the importance of school–enterprise collaboration, recent evolutionary-game research has extended analysis to three- and four-party interaction structures. The key theoretical issue is therefore not whether multiple actors can be incorporated, but how payoff complementarities and stability conditions shape competing institutional outcomes. Based on bounded rationality, this study develops an evolutionary game model involving government, vocational institutions, and firms, integrating joint governance returns, institutional transformation costs, and firm participation benefits into a coupled payoff structure. Replicator dynamics and Jacobian-based local stability conditions are derived for low- and high-cooperation boundary equilibria. Numerical simulations with stylized parameters examine initial conditions, parameter variations, contrasting readiness configurations, and numerical step-size robustness. Results show that high cooperation becomes locally stable when joint governance benefits exceed policy support costs and when institutional and firm returns each exceed their respective costs and outside-option benefits; unfavorable cost–benefit configurations may instead stabilize low cooperation. Within the examined settings, government support, transformation costs, firm participation benefits, and initial strategic probabilities affect both convergence direction and evolutionary speed. Compared with existing one-stage tripartite, staged vocational-education, and hierarchical four-party models, this study establishes a coupled government–institution–firm replicator framework incorporating joint governance returns, reciprocal institution–firm payoff complementarities, explicit Jacobian/eigenvalue stability conditions for competing boundary equilibria, and initial-condition-dependent transition dynamics.