Impact of government’s support policy on decision-making of platform participants under ESG

Abstract

Blockchain-based token platform economy is a new branch of digital platform economics. Constructing a continuous time dynamic model of token platform economy, this paper analyzes what kind of ESG policy is appropriate for the government, meanwhile the token platform participants (developers, users and speculators) make optimal investments and decisions under ESG policy. Simulation result shows neutral ESG policy is optimal. Based on the given neutral ESG policy, we have done the research on ESG investment and decision strategies for platform participants. Our research shows that the tokens selling rate and efforts of green platform (ESG score greater than 0) developers are lower than the ones of brown platform (ESG score less than 0). Consequently, when developers’ token retention is about half of the initial amount, users should invest more brown tokens. Speculators should invest brown tokens for developers’ high token retention. Green token investments of speculators and users are needed in other cases. Next, the impact of the government’s three ESG policies on the maturity or termination of the platform also been analyzed. An important conclusion occurred: the government’s aggressive or conservative ESG policy cannot make the development of the green platform better; Therefore, we suggest a neutral ESG policy which means that the government could adopt high tax incentive and high tax burden on the green and brown platform while it is not necessary to implement the extra subsidy and punishment policy on the green and brown platform.