Facilitating digital transformation in the construction industry: Evolutionary game among key stakeholders integrating with system dynamics

Digital transformation (DT) is essential for enhancing workflow, collaboration, and process efficiency in construction. Current research has mainly highlighted the benefits of each stakeholder and identified the factors influencing the adoption of different digital technologies in the construction industry. However, diverse interactive processes of influencing factors and benefits are driven by heterogeneous behavioral strategies of stakeholders in DT, which dynamically influence the benefits to multistakeholders but are less studied. Therefore, this study analyzes the interaction among the stakeholders including government, building developers, construction companies, and design units, and proposes a four-party evolutionary game model to describe and examine the strategies of stakeholders' DT through a payoff matrix. This study also simulates the impacts of factors influencing DT through a system dynamics approach and verifies the validity of the model. There are three main results of this research. First, subsidies of ¥30-45 accelerate the evolutionary rate toward positive DT strategies by 40%-60%, while penalties of ¥5-20 enhance the evolutionary rate by 10%-77%, compared to extreme thresholds. Balanced incentives optimize system evolution. Second, if building developers reward construction companies, then the construction companies will be further motivated to explore DT, the evolutionary rate increased by 17%-69%, thus increasing mutual benefits. Finally, the increase in the digital capability coefficient of market players can accelerate the evolutionary rate (increases evolutionary rate up to 92%) toward positive behavioral strategies. This study is expected to provide new ideas and references for the improvement of the behavioral strategies of key stakeholders to enhance DT in the construction industry from the perspective of the game of key stakeholders.