Evolutionary Game Analysis of Energy Enterprises’ Technological Transformation and Pollution–Carbon Reduction Decisions Under Reputation Incentive Mechanism

As major sources of pollution and carbon emissions, energy enterprises have long faced challenges in their technological transformation due to the industry’s characteristics of high investment costs and strong lock-in effects. While formal mechanisms such as government subsidies can impose short-term constraints, they fail to stimulate the sector’s intrinsic motivation. Can the reputation incentive mechanism be the key to breaking the deadlock? This paper constructs a three-party evolutionary game model involving energy enterprises, the public, and the government from the perspective of informal institutions. For the first time, it incorporates the dual effects of reputation gains and losses into a unified framework. The results show that reputation incentives are not merely a “cherry on top,” but rather independently drive transformation by moderating enterprises’ cost–benefit structures. The evolution of the three-party strategies exhibits dynamic synergy, and the system equilibrium depends on the threshold matching of key parameters. Subsidy policies are effective in the short term, but may crowd out the role of reputation in the long term. This paper reveals the underlying logic by which the integration of informal institutions and formal regulations drives profound transformation, offering new theoretical perspectives and practical guidance for designing incentive-compatible multi-stakeholder governance frameworks.