Modeling And Simulation On Consumers’ Cooperative Carbon Emission Reduction Based On Peer Pressure Effects

Studies show that the growth of personal energy consumption is the main reason for the recent surging of global carbon emissions.However,so far,energy saving and emission reduction regulations and policies at home and abroad have been focused on management of production.As for consumers,governments mainly take regulations with soft constraints on individuals,via encouraging low-carbon life,or improving consumer’s awareness of environmental protection,etc.In order to promote low carbon products or ideas,limited carbon quotas and taxes(or subsidies)are designed to control emissions by reducing low carbon’s costs or sending more punishment to negative external behaviors.However,the neglect of high transaction cost and the interaction between individuals,makes it hard for the traditional measures to achieve Pareto optimal.Peer pressure refers to extensive information exchange and communication between people,and the interaction and dissemination of information can directly or indirectly affect people’s social behavior.In order to design an effective emission reduction incentive mechanism focusing on the individual consumers,this thesis introduces peer pressure from the social mechanism to the low carbon field,studies on the changing of consumers’ behaviors in a local group,and makes an evolutionary game analysis.The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze the effect of peer pressure on consumption decisions of two types of products:energy commodities and green commodities under the condition of partial information symmetry.It’s found peer pressure mechanism can effectively monitor and motivate consumers’ low carbon behavior.When the group’s overall income level rises,it requires less peer pressure to achieve the same reduction.Next,based on that model,we simulate low carbon evolutionary games on spatial cluster network,and add learning strategies to stimulate low-carbon activities:conformity and opinion leaders.It shows that the complex network structures and the characters of consumers have important impacts on the evolution of consumer’s low carbon strategies.Finally,this thesis designs a social mechanism to stimulate the cooperative carbon emission reduction,compares it with the Pigouvian tax with peer information,and proves that social mechanism can work better.The main significances of this thesis are:first considering using peer pressure to stimulate consumers to carry out positively external low carbon emission reduction behaviors;the peer pressure mechanism enriches the theoretical researches of consumer emission reduction,and provides new ideas and solutions for the government to carry out emission reduction.