Guiding Policies Of Urban Residents' Green Lifestyle And Its Simulation Research From The Perspective Of Utility Dislocation

Green lifestyle is a social culture and living model that promotes the harmonious coexistence and sustainable development among humans,nature,and society.It is an important carrier of ecological civilization and an inevitable way to achieve green development.At present,the green lifestyle change is gradually shifting from a “government action” led by the country to a “collective action” led by the society.The policy utility has become a key factor to achieve this change.However,in the actual situation where policy makers and target groups are separated from each other,urban residents' response to guiding policies of green lifestyle is not ideal enough.The green lifestyle change often manifests as a single and mighty government action.However,the collective action seriously falls behind,leading to the failure of policy intentions and even the whole policy.The primary cause of this dilemma is that government-led policies have been developed from the perspective of “policy makers” rather than that of “target groups”.In other words,the decision utility of policy makers is inconsistent with the experienced utility of urban residents,and there is even a huge “utility dislocation”.The dislocation implies that when guiding residents to adopt a green lifestyle,the government has separated the micro-individual acceptance willingness from the policy orientation,making it difficult to fully implement the policy.Therefore,it is urgently necessary to analyze the guiding policies of green lifestyle from the perspective of utility dislocation and explicit the effect of the guiding policies on the change of green lifestyle.Taking policy utility dislocation as a breakthrough and urban residents in eastern China as research object,this dissertation used qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to study guiding policies of urban residents' green lifestyle with multidisciplinary knowledge,namely,management,behavioral decision,behavioral economics,environmental economics,social psychology,and computer science.The research contents and conclusions are as follows.(1)Theoretical framework construction of utility dislocation of green lifestyle guiding policies.Policy utility dislocation was defined as the gap between decision utility and experienced utility from a dual perspective.Causes of policy utility dislocation was discussed from the following aspects,namely,policies themselves,executive departments,target groups,relevant enterprises,and social environment.Meanwhile,generation mechanism of policy utility dislocation was analyzed from organizational basis,realistic possibility,and subjective motivation.Furthermore,a measurable policy utility dislocation model was constructed,in which both policy makers and target groups were included in the same measurement framework.Four basic attributes,heterogeneity,non-negativity,objectivity and implicitness,was explained for policy utility dislocation.Last,a flow chartwas proposed to measure policy utility dislocation.(2)Construction of policy decision utility evaluation model and measurement of decision utility of green lifestyle guiding policies.A 4D evaluation model consisting of policy power,policy goals,policy methods and policy feedback was established.In the meantime,the value assignment standard of the four dimensions was set.447 guiding policy data from 1991 to 2019 in China for green lifestyle were collected from the official government website,pkulaw.cn and wanfang data.Then,the evolution trend and development trend of green lifestyle promoting policies were explained in terms of the policy release dates,numbers,departments and types.The quantification of policy text was completed based on the assignment standard.Next,the weights of the policy power,policy goal,policy measures and policy feedbacks were calculated using fuzzy rough set method.It was found that the influence of four dimensions on the policy decision utility was significantly different,with a declining influence order of policy methods(0.304),policy goals(0.292),policy feedbacks(0.218),and policy power(0.186).The decision utility of green lifestyle guiding policies was calculated from 1991 to 2019 based on the 4D evaluation model.It was found that the decision utility of green lifestyle guiding policies has increased significantly in fluctuations.In addition,the largest decision utility was 3.79 in 2019.(3)Value measurement of experienced utility of green lifestyle guiding policies,theoretical model construction and verification of its influence mechanism.Based on literature review and qualitative research,this study firstly clarified the multidimensional conceptual framework of experienced utility.Then,the utility was defined from the following five dimensions,namely,functional experienced utility,cost experienced utility,social experienced utility,emotional experienced utility and green experienced utility.Social interaction was divided into four dimensions like structural characteristics,functional characteristics,relationship characteristics,and information characteristics.Afterwards,a theoretical model of the influence mechanism of experienced utility for green lifestyle guiding policies was constructed.This model considered a set of new variables such as class identification,self-learning ability,preference,symbolic value attention,normative internalization,level of expertise and social interaction.A formal survey was conducted to measure urban residents' experienced utility toward green lifestyle guiding policies and verify the above-mentioned theoretical model.It was found that the mean value of experienced utility is 3.18.Besides,the mean values of the experienced utility are significantly different in five dimensions,with an ascending order of cost experienced utility(mean value=2.76),functional experienced utility(mean value=2.93),emotional experienced utility(mean value=3.15),social experienced utility(mean value=3.21)and green experienced utility(mean value=3.87).The results show that experienced utility of green lifestyle guiding policies can be influenced by seven categories of factors.Moreover,there are five typical relationship structures among these factors.The structures are listed as below.Firstly,experienced utility of green lifestyle guiding policies differs in demographic variables significantly.Secondly,experienced utility of green lifestyle guiding policies can be directly influenced by individual and group factors.Thirdly,individual and group factors can also influence experienced utility of green lifestyle guiding policies via psychological empowerment perception.Fourthly,experienced utility will affect the perception of psychological empowerment in reverse.Finally,social interaction,policy implementation and cost of policy implementation can regulate the relationship between the psychological empowerment perception and experienced utility of green lifestyle guiding policies.(4)Calculation and computer simulation of policy utility dislocation.Firstly,by virtue the policy decision utility based on text quantitative measurement and the policy experienced utility based on questionnaire survey,the utility dislocation of green lifestyle guiding policies since 1991 was calculated.The result shows that there is a significant policy utility dislocation of China's green lifestyle guiding policies.Moreover,the dislocation is increasing in the fluctuation with a value between 0.50 and 0.60 in the past three years.Secondly,a simulation was carried out by using Matlab2017 b software to explore the evolution of policy utility dislocation in situational intervention based on the policy utility dislocation model and the revised theoretical model of the policy experienced utility.Results indicate that policy utility dislocation can be influenced by social interaction,policy implementation progress and cost.The higher the structural,functional,relationship and positive information characteristics of the social interaction is,the higher the policy popularity degree.Then,the execution and validity of the policy gets higher,which means lower utility dislocation of the guiding policies and better equilibrium.There is a positive relationship among monetary costs,non-monetary cost and utility dislocation when implementing the guiding policies of green lifestyle.In addition,the policy utility dislocation and its equilibrium are affected by the ways selected by senders of the interaction information.In stochastic relational network,strong relational network and weak relational network,the policy utility dislocation is lower when giving priority to utility dislocation,while the equilibrium of utility dislocation of green lifestyle guiding policies is more stable when giving priority to relationship.Moreover,the policy utility dislocation is the highest and the equilibrium is the worst in stochastic relational network.Lastly,a concept of dislocation tolerance coefficient was put forward and defined as the ratio of experienced utility to decision utility.The experienced utility function of green lifestyle guiding policies was built from normative social influence and informational social influence generated from the social interaction.With parameters set according to the questionnaire survey,a multi-agent simulation was conducted to analyze the impact of utility dislocation and perceived convenience on urban residents' implementation of green lifestyle guiding policies using Anylogic 8.3 software.The results illustrated that a greater dislocation tolerance coefficient can motivate residents to practice a green lifestyle guiding policy with more stable decisionmaking status.Perceived convenience can positively promote residents to adopt green lifestyle guiding policies.In addition,it was found that the gap between resident number practicing green lifestyle guiding policies reduces with different dislocation tolerance coefficients as the perceived convenience decreases.Interestingly,the dislocation tolerance coefficients present an “inactivating” state in the context of low perception convenience.(5)Research on promotion policies to reduce the utility dislocation of green lifestyle guiding policies.In this dissertation a policy suggestion framework was constructed to reduce the policy utility dislocation of guiding policies from the four directions,namely,the target groups,social environment,policies themselves and policy implementation and six aspects,namely,individual and group factors,psychological empowerment perception,social interaction and policies factors,demographic characteristics,policy experience and policy decisions.In the end,primary suggestions,pivotal suggestions,boosted suggestions,targeted suggestions,internalized suggestions and nourished suggestions are proposed to reduce the utility dislocation of green lifestyle guiding policies.There are 93 figures,121 tables,and 246 references in this dissertation.