How to Promote the Withdrawal of Rural Land Contract Rights? An Evolutionary Game Analysis Based on Prospect Theory

The phenomenon of “separation of people and land” between urbanized farmers and rural land hinders the optimal allocation of land resources and is not conducive to the development of agricultural modernization and the implementation of rural revitalization strategies. Although the “separation of three rights” in agricultural land partially solves this problem, it also causes social inequity in the phenomenon of urbanized wealthy farmers collecting rent from poor farmers who depend on the land for a living. The Chinese government carried out a pilot reform aimed at the withdrawal of urbanized farmers from contracted land, and proposed a paid withdrawal policy, but the reform results were unsatisfactory. Based on evolutionary game theory and prospect theory, this paper constructed a two-party evolutionary game model between the government and farmers and simulated the behavioral strategies of the government and farmers in the contracted land withdrawal problem. The results show that first, the initial probability of government policy choice will affect the decision-making behavior of the government and farmers. Second, when the government’s economic compensation for farmers is higher than the farmers’ ideal expectation for land withdrawal compensation, the implementation of individualized withdrawal policy has a positive effect on farmers’ willingness to withdraw from contracted land. Third, farmers’ emotional needs for land, farmers’ ideal economic compensation, and farmers’ risk aversion all impede farmers’ withdrawal from contracted land. The government’s implementation of individualized withdrawal policy can improve farmers’ willingness to withdraw from contracted land by reducing farmers’ concerns about unstable land rights, improving the government’s security compensation, and reducing farmers’ sensitivity to profit and loss.