The Role of Core Enterprises in Manufacturing Supply Chain Digital Transformation with Industrial Internet Platform Support: A Hypergraph Evolutionary Game Analysis

Digital transformation (DT) is reshaping manufacturing, with core enterprises (CEs) leveraging their resources to build industrial Internet platforms (IIPs) that support ordinary enterprises (OEs) in adopting DT. Differences in enterprise roles lead to varying impacts of government subsidies, necessitating careful policy design. Crucially, IIP adoption involves higher-order, multi-player interactions beyond conventional pairwise relationships—a dimension often overlooked in existing quantitative studies. This research employs hypergraph theory to model these complex interactions on IIPs and applies evolutionary game theory to analyze how enterprise decisions and government subsidies shape DT dynamics in manufacturing supply chains. The findings reveal that: (1) The network effect is the primary driver for DT via IIPs, but its promotional impact exhibits diminishing marginal returns. (2) Governments should prioritize subsidizing CEs for platform establishment, as subsidies directed at OEs for DT adoption are less effective. (3) Before withdrawing subsidies, governments must ensure a sufficiently high IIP adoption rate to sustain DT autonomously. This study introduces a novel methodology for examining DT and offers theoretical insights to guide enterprise strategy and policy implementation.