Analyzing decision strategies of government and private sector in data resource utilization for PPP smart city

The Public-private partnership (PPP) smart city projects possess data resources expand over time of operation. To explore the change process of the decision-making behaviour of the government and the private sector on data use, this paper constructs an evolutionary game model of data use between the government and the private sector in PPP smart city projects from the perspective of data resource use. The evolutionary stabilization strategies under different conditions are analyzed, and the sensitivity analysis of the selected parameters is discussed in detail. The results show that with the growth of data resources in smart cities, the private sector will accelerate the adoption of speculative behaviours and preempt the government’s full adoption of a strong regulatory strategy to maximize its benefits. When the private sector uses data resources to bring huge speculative benefits, it continues to engage in speculative behaviour even if project losses increase. The findings underscore the importance of optimizing adaptive regulatory mechanisms and incentive–penalty policies to develop a data governance framework that balances data utilization with the protection of governmental and public interests. This mitigates opportunistic behaviour by the private sector.