Research on multi agent collaborative waste electrical and 2026 Journal of C

China's WEEE recycling rate remains significantly below market demand, hindering the industry's transition toward modern online recycling systems. This study develops a tripartite evolutionary game model involving recycling platforms, e-commerce platforms, and consumers under government regulation, using second-hand mobile phone recycling as a representative empirical context. Departing from traditional models that assume consumer homogeneity, we incorporate consumer heterogeneity by segmenting consumers into three distinct groups — Green Pioneers, Pragmatic Rationalists, and Traditional Conservatives — via K-Means clustering, each characterized by differentiated initial online recycling probabilities. Numerical simulations demonstrate that government intervention significantly incentivizes recycling participation and fosters inter-platform collaboration. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis identifies critical thresholds for subsidy saturation and penalty-induced behavioral shifts. Robustness tests confirm the stability of evolutionary outcomes across diverse initial conditions and ± 10% parameter perturbations; notably, Sobol sensitivity analysis identifies the recycling platform's unit processing revenue as the primary driver of cooperative evolution. The novelty of this work lies in integrating consumer segmentation into an evolutionary game framework, allowing for granular, segment-specific policy analysis. This study contributes to the literature by extending the standard tripartite game.