LAUSR

Abstract This paper explores the effective incentive mechanisms for personal carbon accounts (PCAs) to reduce carbon emissions from household. First, a novel Public-Private Partnership for personal carbon accounts (PPP-PCAs) is constructed to discover the incentive effect of the integration of government mechanisms and market mechanisms on emissions reduction from household energy consumption. Second, the evolutionary game model among the government, financial institution, and consumer is presented to analyze the evolutionary stability strategies (ESS) of participants and verify the effectiveness of PPP-PCAs. Finally, taking Ant Forest as an example, we perform sensitivity analyses of key parameters and describe the optimal path to promote the development of PCAs. The numerical results show that government mechanisms, such as subsidies and carbon taxes have little effect on consumers’ low-carbon decisions, without any other participants. When the private sectors, e.g., financial institutions, enterprises and carbon platforms are introduced into model, the market mechanisms can effectively promote the healthy and rapid development of PCAs. It finds that the government’s low-carbon subsidies for financial institutions are the most effective, followed by the low-carbon benefits provided by the private sectors to consumers. The above conclusions can provide a theoretical basis and reference for the incentive mechanisms to promote the development of PCAs.