Abstract: Food safety incidents occur frequently due to the opportunistic behavior of food enterprises and has constituted a threat to human health and social stability. This paper builds an evolutionary game model and uses a replicator equation to describe the selection and evolution path of food enterprises and local governments under various subsidy and punishment mechanisms according to the payoff matrices of their respective behavior strategies. Then, the influence of parameters on the evolutionary strategies of the system is analyzed. Finally, numerical simulations are given. The findings are as follows. Under the static subsidy and static punishment mechanism, producers’ efforts in food safety and local governments’ regulatory strategies fluctuate around a central point without a point of equilibrium and stability. Under the dynamic subsidy and static punishment mechanism, the system evolution process is a closed-loop with periodic motion. Under the static subsidy and dynamic punishment mechanism and dynamic subsidy and dynamic punishment, producers’s efforts and local governments’ regulatory strategies tend to remain at a stable equilibrium point. The evolution equilibrium of both parties in the system is affected by such parameters as the size of subsidy and punishment of government. The findings have certain enlightenment for local governments to formulate reasonable incentive strategies for subsidies and punishments.

Key words: food safety, subsidy and punishment mechanism, evolutionary game