Research on System Dynamic of Buying Work Safety Services in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Abstract

Buying work safety services from intermediaries is a new and important approach to improve the work safety in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The existing literature addresses the significance and effectiveness of the service model but it ignores the dynamic game relationship between relevant stakeholders when SMEs choose to purchase the services under bounded rationality. Therefore, this study aims to analyse this dynamic game relationship based on evolutionary game theory. Furthermore, dynamic simulations of the evolutionary game model are applied to determine the impact of major factors for three stakeholders (SMEs, governments, and safety service agents), examine stability strategies, and identify modes of equilibrium under different subsidy strategies. The results of simulation are as follows. First, the results explain that how the major factors (service price, the quality of service, government subsidy, etc.) affect the system dynamic force of buying work safety services. Second, when the subsidy strategy is static payment, the selection of the stakeholders fluctuates and is not optimal. Third, when the subsidy strategy is a dynamic payment, the evolutionary game process converges to a stable state, which indicates that an evolutionarily stable strategy exists under the dynamic subsidy strategy. Moreover, the stable state and equilibrium values are not affected by the different initial values. The results of this study offer a certain reference for the government to guide the implementation of the purchase of work safety or other services in SMEs

Keywords

Small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) / work safety services / evolutionary game theory / system dynamics

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