Infection mechanism of greenwashing behavior of construction material enterprises under multi-agent interaction

Some construction material enterprises engage in greenwashing behavior (GWB) and expand the scale of GWB through inter-enterprise infection. This study aimed to reveal the infection mechanism of the GWB in construction material enterprises using an agent-based modeling method with the epidemic model and complex adaptive system. The study concluded that: (1) the intensity of government regulations negatively influence the infection scale of the construction material enterprises' GWB, (2) compared with local media supervision, the suppression of the infection scale of construction material enterprises' GWB by non-local media is more obvious, (3) when the GWB of construction material enterprises is disclosed, the degree of consumers’ green preferences negatively affects their GWB, (4) and when the information transparency of construction material enterprises is 0.6, the infection scale of their GWB is best suppressed. Therefore, this study provided the practical experience of multi-agent collaborative governance of GWB in other industries or regions. •Infection mechanism of the greenwashing behavior of construction material enterprises is found.•Greenwashing incubation period is considered in the simulation evolution process.•Effects of multi-agent interactions for greenwashing behavior are summarized.