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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1461376
This article is part of the Research Topic Challenges and Solutions in Forecasting and Decision-Making in Marine Economy and Management View all 4 articles

Performance evaluation of marine ecological compensation in coastal cities of China via a novel two-stage bargaining game DEA with imprecise data

Provisionally accepted
Zezhou Zou Zezhou Zou Xiaofan Zhang Xiaofan Zhang *Jinwu Gao Jinwu Gao Jian Li Jian Li
  • Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    To alleviate the pressure of economic development on the marine environment, the Marine Ecological Compensation (MEC) has become a major policy tool for the Chinese government to reconcile the contradiction between economic development and the marine environment. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage bargaining game data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to evaluate the performance of MEC under the cooperative structure. The proposed model considers the link between marine economic development (MED) and marine environmental protection (MEP). Meanwhile, the equivalent form, Nash equilibrium solution, sensitivity and stability of the model are as well documented to further analyze MED and MEP. Eventually, a case study of 30 coastal cities in China serves to verify the practicable effectiveness of the foregoing model combined with numerical simulation and support key insights as below: (i) According to the results evaluated by the decentralized DEA model, we find that if one party of MED and MEP takes priority, the efficiency score of the other party will be severely affected; (ii) the evaluation results of sensitivity and stability demonstrate that inputs and outputs have different impact degrees on the efficiency scores of MED and MEP, which provide directions for improving the efficiency of both systems; (iii) The proposed model addresses the limitation of the conventional two-stage DEA model that can not handle uncertain variables, thus revealing the influence of uncertainty on MEC efficiency. The compelling evidence presented in the case study solidifies the effectiveness of the proposed model, establishing its promising prospects for application in evaluating the performance of DMUs with a two-stage structure.

    Keywords: Marine ecological compensation, Uncertainty theory, Uncertain DEA, Uncertain variable, sustainable development

    Received: 08 Jul 2024; Accepted: 12 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Zou, Zhang, Gao and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Xiaofan Zhang, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.