Digital Economy and Four-Chain Coupling Synergy in Applied Higher Education Institutions: Effects and Mechanisms

Digital transformation reshapes applied higher education institutions’ industrial demand perception, talent training, research commercialization and regional innovation participation. This paper constructs a complex-network evolutionary game model to explore the effects of the digital economy on four-chain coupling synergy among education, talent, innovation, and industry. Regional stakeholders are modeled as boundedly rational agents in heterogeneous collaborative networks, choosing between deep four-chain coupling and fragmented adaptation based on local payoffs. The payoff system includes digital benefit amplification, cost reduction, policy incentives, mismatch losses, spillover gains and governance quality. Analytical derivations show that digitalization increases the relative payoff of coupling and lowers the local collaboration threshold, with this effect reinforced by policy incentives and favorable network structures. Numerical analyses show that digital readiness, policy support, and governance quality promote high-coupling equilibria, while network topology shapes diffusion speed and stability; high coupling costs and low initial adoption hinder diffusion. Hub-oriented scale-free and core-periphery networks can accelerate strategy diffusion, whereas small-world networks converge more steadily but more slowly. This paper clarifies the micro-level cross-chain incentive mechanism of digitalization and identifies network conditions for universities to translate digital resources into regional innovation capacity, offering implications for higher education governance and regional digital policy.