Independent or collaborative management? Regional management strategy for ocean carbon sink trading based on game theory

The drawbacks of independent management are increasingly prominent since the ocean carbon sink trading market is fragmented, leading to controversies such as “different prices for the same carbon”. In addition, ocean carbon sinks have positive externality characteristics, which can easily induce free-rider behavior in regional independent management. It is necessary to bridge the gap between regional carbon markets as soon as possible and realize collaborative management of ocean carbon sinks in various regions. In order to explore the regional management strategy for ocean carbon sink trading, this paper constructs a game model of ocean carbon sink market trading among ocean carbon sink producers, demand enterprises, trading platforms and local governments, analyzes the output, trading volume, trading price and total profit of ocean carbon sink management in neighboring regions under independent and collaborative management. The conclusions show that regional collaborative management is more conducive to promoting ocean carbon sink market transactions. Compared with the independent management, the overall profit, carbon sink trading price, the carbon sink output, the trading volume, the trading platform commission, subsidies given to producers and platform of collaborative management are higher. The contributions are as follows. First, this paper incorporates the trading platform and government into the cooperative game model, which makes the game model more consistent with the actual situation at the early stage of ocean carbon sink market trading. Second, this paper compares the cost-benefit of independent and collaborative management models to provide a theoretical reference for regional collaborative management of ocean carbon sink.