Research on the cooperative mechanism of government and enterprise for basin ecological compensation based on differential game

Hao Sun; Guangkuo Gao; Zonghuo Li

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0254411

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 4, 2021
12 Apr 2021 Decision Letter - Carlos Gracia-Lázaro, Editor PONE-D-21-07220 Research on the Cooperative Mechanism of Government and Enterprise for Basin Ecological Compensation Based on Differential Game PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sun, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 24 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter. 3. Please amend the manuscript submission data (via Edit Submission) to include author Gao Guang-Kuo and Li Zong-Huo. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: In this work, the authors consider the role of enterprises into the ecological compensation process. They make use of the differential game theory to explore the impact of different compensation mechanisms on the revenue of government and enterprises. The paper may contain novel ideas and provide suggestive reference for the government decision-making. 1. However, I might be suspicious about the correctness of your results, since there are some obvious errors in the analysis solution of differential equations. For example, in Eq. (12) and (14), I do not agree with the results you got in Eq. (14) when substituting the expression V1and V2 into Eq. (12). The first term in Eq. (14) is lack of ‘R’ and the numerator in the last term should be lambda2 so that it could correspond to that in Eq. (12). Additionally, the solution b2 seems to be partially unfinished and I cannot obtain the equation (15) by substituting a1 and a2, where it seems a1 and b1 should not be the same. The quantities ‘Vb’ and ‘Vg’ should not appear in Eq. (22) and (24) and so on. To this end, I recommend authors should make a detailed check of the solutions for all the compensation mechanisms. 2. I also think the introduction part is rather lengthy and wordy about the advantages of involving the enterprises into the ecological compensation process. I would recommend that here authors should give some background knowledge of the model you used. 3. I suggest that the manuscript needs editing well since there are some grammatical errors, such as the disagreement of singular-plural. Reviewer #2: The paper entitled “Research on the Cooperative Mechanism of Government and Enterprise for Basin Ecological Compensation Based on Differential Game” deals with actual and very interesting topic. It is quite interesting and informative to most readers of this field such as PhD students, and might have some interest by practitioners. However, I have the following comments that hopefully help the authors improve their paper: • The introduction section is mixed with a literature review. I suggest to the authors a section dedicated to literature review where should analyse the existing works in the way to show the gap in the literature compared to this work. • The authors should convince the readers of this journal, that their contribution is so important. • In relation to literature review, it would be better if authors can have a table comparing the closely related works and theories on various dimensions and clearly showing the contribution of the paper. • I suggest that the authors add a research method diagram. This will provide a snapshot of the research steps followed and will help the reader in a clearer understanding of the paper. • In chapter 5, dedicated to analysis of calculation examples, Is there any other source of information to support the parameters’ selection in the model? • All the results provided in the paper should be compared with other approaches. In order to evaluate the robustness of the authors’ proposed. • These issues deserve a deeper discussion. What are the main limitations of this approach? What are the implications for theory and practice? What are the managerial implications from this research? How decision or policy makers could benefit from this study. • As usual a final thorough proof-reading is recommended. I encourage the authors to think along those questions and to develop this work further along those lines. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254411.r001
Revision 1
19 May 2021 Author Response Dear Editor and Reviewers: On behalf of my co-authors, we thank you very much for giving us an opportunity to revise our manuscript and appreciate your positive and constructive comments very much. Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and made corrections which, we hope, have improved the quality of the paper to your satisfaction. The revisions have been highlighted across the text. Our responses to your valuable comments and the main corrections in the paper are as follows: Responds to Reviewer #1 Comment 1: I might be suspicious about the correctness of your results, since there are some obvious errors in the analysis solution of differential equations. For example, in Eq. (12) and (14), I do not agree with the results you got in Eq. (14) when substituting the expression V1and V2 into Eq. (12). The first term in Eq. (14) is lack of ‘R’ and the numerator in the last term should be lambda2 so that it could correspond to that in Eq. (12). Additionally, the solution b2 seems to be partially unfinished and I cannot obtain the equation (15) by substituting a1 and a2, where it seems a1 and b1 should not be the same. The quantities ‘Vb’ and ‘Vg’ should not appear in Eq. (22) and (24) and so on. To this end, I recommend authors should make a detailed check of the solutions for all the compensation mechanisms. We believe that these changes are in line with your requirements. Response: Thank you for your comments. Following your comment, we are guilty of a basic calculation error. We have carefully examined all the compensation mechanism solutions in the paper and corrected the errors. In order to make the calculation process more clear, we refine the calculation of individual formulas in the paper, but it does not affect the conclusion in the paper. We have also replaced the confusing symbols in the article, for example, is replaced by, all the substitution symbols are marked. Comment 2: I also think the introduction part is rather lengthy and wordy about the advantages of involving the enterprises into the ecological compensation process. I would recommend that here authors should give some background knowledge of the model you used. Response: Thanks for your valuable comment. Following your comment, we have simplified the description of the advantages of enterprises participating in ecological compensation in the introduction, and added the background knowledge of differential game model in the introduction. The deletion of a lengthy part of the introduction as follows: Ecological compensation system has been widely used in the world, its connotation includes two aspects: The first is to compensate for the ecological environment, mainly including the cost of water and soil conservation, greening and pollution control in the basin; The other is the compensation for participants, that is to the relevant subjects involved in ecological protection will be given certain incentives and preferences., such as land subsidies for residents who have returned farmland, tax incentives for green and energy-saving industries, etc. The added background knowledge of the game model is as follows: Differential game theory originated from the research on the pursuit of two parties in military confrontation carried out by the US Air Force in the 1950s. It is a combination of optimal control and game theory. It studies the continuous game of multiple players in a time-continuous system, in which the players try to optimize their independent goals, and eventually reach a Nash equilibrium over time. Comment 3: I suggest that the manuscript needs editing well since there are some grammatical errors, such as the disagreement of singular-plural. Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We have carefully checked the paper and corrected some grammatical errors in the paper. Responds to Reviewer #2 Comment 1: The introduction section is mixed with a literature review. I suggest to the authors a section dedicated to literature review where should analyse the existing works in the way to show the gap in the literature compared to this work. Response: Thanks for your good comment. Following your comment, we separately describe the introduction and literature review, and added some literature to enrich the literature review part of the paper. Comment 2: The authors should convince the readers of this journal, that their contribution is so important. Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. Following your comment, we have added the importance of the research. We believe that these changes are in line with your requirements. The corresponding content is copied as follows: Watershed ecological compensation needs a large amount of funds. If only the payment is made by the government finance, it will cause great pressure on the government finance, and it is difficult to realize the sustainable compensation. Enterprise are the main cause of river basin pollution and the main beneficiary of river basin pollution. According to the principle that whoever damages shall restore and who benefits shall compensate, the enterprise shall bear the responsibility of compensation. Therefore, it is of great significance to bring polluting enterprises into the research framework of ecological compensation, and to discuss the decision-making behavior and influencing factors of government and enterprises in the process of ecological compensation. Comment 3: In relation to literature review, it would be better if authors can have a table comparing the closely related works and theories on various dimensions and clearly showing the contribution of the paper. Response: Thank you for your valuable comment. Following your comment, we have added a literature table to show the content and characteristics of the scholars' research, and also describe the differences between our research and the scholars' previous research. The corresponding content is shown in Table 1. Comment 4: I suggest that the authors add a research method diagram. This will provide a snapshot of the research steps followed and will help the reader in a clearer understanding of the paper. Response: Thanks for your valuable comment. Following your comment, We have added a research method diagram to describe the research process in detail, it can help the reader clearer understand the paper. The corresponding content is shown in Figure 2. Comment 5: In chapter 5, dedicated to analysis of calculation examples, Is there any other source of information to support the parameters’ selection in the model? Response: Thanks for your valuable comment. Following your comment, We explain the sources of the parameters in the article. Since the ecological compensation mechanism proposed in this paper is a new operations management theory, direct real data cannot be obtained. Therefore, this paper combined with the relevant data in China Environmental Statistics Yearbook and Local statistical yearbook, make the parameter setting as practical as possible. The data in the China Environmental Statistics Yearbook and Local statistical yearbook are open access. Specific reference data are as follows: China Environmental Statistics Yearbook (2020) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YHJSD&bh= Second, water environment; Tenth, environmental investment China Environmental Statistics Yearbook (2019) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YZGHW&bh=N2020070223 Environmental Planning Institute of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment: Ecological compensation and biodiversity conservation Suzhou Yearbook (2020) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YSZNJ&bh= Selections of documents: The Office of the Suzhou Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Office of the Suzhou Municipal People's Government issued the Notice on the Implementation of Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting and Implementing the Experience of the Pilot Ecological Compensation Mechanism in the Xin 'an River Basin Finance Yearbook of Anhui Province (2020) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YAHCZ&bh= Support the battle against pollution: To support horizontal ecological compensation in the upper and lower reaches of the Xin 'an River Basin; Promote ecological compensation for water environment in Dabie Mountain Area; establish and improve mechanisms for compensating for ecological damage. fiscal management: Anhui innovates to implement different types of ecological compensation mechanisms Yearbook of Lu Quan (2020) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YLUQU&bh= Ecological poverty alleviation: ecological compensation to increase income Financial Yearbook of Zhejiang Province (2019) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YZJCZ&bh=N2020010090 Research Report Selection: Quzhou City's Practice and Reflection on Establishing the Whole Urban Upstream and Downstream Ecological Compensation Mechanism Hefei Yearbook (2019) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YHFNJ&bh=N2021040077 Ecological construction and environmental protection: Chaohu Lake management Guiyang Yearbook (2019) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YPAKF&bh=N2019120318 Water environmental management: ecological compensation for water pollution control Xuancheng Yearbook (2019) https://navi.cnki.net/KNavi/YearbookDetail?pcode=CYFD&pykm=YAHXC&bh=N2020030245 Pollution prevention and control: water environment ecological compensation Comment 6: All the results provided in the paper should be compared with other approaches. In order to evaluate the robustness of the authors’ proposed. Response: Thanks for your valuable comment. Following your comment, We compare the research method in this paper with other research methods and illustrate the advantages of this research method. We believe that these changes are in line with your requirements. The corresponding content is copied as follows: In this paper, the differential game model is used to study the ecological compensation problem, which gets rid of the original research model from the qualitative perspective. Considering the influence of enterprise reputation on enterprise sales, and taking the enterprise sales as the decision variable, the dynamic process of decision-making between government and enterprise in the process of ecological compensation can be described more accurately. Comment 7: These issues deserve a deeper discussion. What are the main limitations of this approach? What are the implications for theory and practice? What are the managerial implications from this research? How decision or policy makers could benefit from this study. Response: Thanks for your valuable comment. Following your comment, We have supplemented the main limitations of this approach, the theoretical and practical implications of the study, the management implications of the study, and how decision makers might benefit from the study. We believe that these changes are in line with your requirements. The corresponding content is copied as follows: The main limitation of this method is that the determination of each parameter value is subjective to a certain extent, and the parameters will be determined through big data association analysis in subsequent studies. The theoretical significance of this paper breaks away from the routine of previous scholars who studied the game between government and enterprises in the process of ecological compensation from a qualitative perspective, and tries to give a better explanation of the decision-making between government and enterprises from a quantitative perspective. The practical significance is that it can relieve the financial pressure of government departments and improve the efficiency of ecological compensation. The implications of this study for managers are as follows: under different ecological compensation coordination mechanisms, the government and enterprises can obtain different benefits, and only in the mode of cooperation between the government and enterprises can the two parties obtain the optimal benefits. Government departments can establish an information sharing platform with enterprises to make a unified decision on the level of ecological compensation, and at the same time increase the publicity of ecological compensation and increase the level of cost sharing for participating enterprises, so as to encourage enterprises to actively carry out ecological compensation. Comment 8: As usual a final thorough proof-reading is recommended. Response: Thanks for your comment. Thorough proofreading has been conducted so that the grammatical, spelling, punctuation, and usage mistakes strewn across the manuscript have been rectified. Special thanks to you for your careful review and good comments, we to think along those questions and to develop this work further along those lines. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.doc https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254411.r002
8 Jun 2021 Decision Letter - Carlos Gracia-Lázaro, Editor PONE-D-21-07220R1 Research on the Cooperative Mechanism of Government and Enterprise for Basin Ecological Compensation Based on Differential Game PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sun, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 23 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. 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Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: N/A ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: The manuscript has significantly improved as compared to the previous version. Indeed, the authors tried to improve it, and the main weaknesses are solved. I am also satisfied with the responses and explanations given by the authors to my comments. Thus, in my opinion, the manuscript is recommendable for publication. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Comments_R1.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254411.r003
Revision 2
13 Jun 2021 Author Response Dear Editor and Reviewers: We thank you very much for giving us an opportunity to revise our manuscript and appreciate your positive and constructive comments very much. We have studied comments carefully and made corrections which, we hope, have improved the quality of the paper to your satisfaction. The revisions have been highlighted across the text. Our responses to your valuable comments and the main corrections in the paper are as follows: Comment 1: Although authors have made most corrections for the compensation mechanism solutions, there are still some errors in the terms of writing. For example, in Eq. (2) and (24), the advertising effect coefficient is “α”, while in the other expressions, this parameter is replaced by “a”. I recommend authors should keep it consistent. In Eq. (22), I believe “2A-A” should be “2A-B”. Besides, I cannot get the results shown in Eqs. (29-30) when substituting the expressions (25), (27) and (28) into (24) and (26) except the numerator of the “L” should be “π1a” or “π1α” rather than “π1µ”. When substituting Eq. (42) into Eq. (41), I found it should be “+” instead of “-” in the first term of Eq. (44). In Eq. (47), the term “1/ρ” in Eq. (46) miss out. I cannot obtain the Eq. (48), since the factor α in front of π2 in Eq. (22) is lost. I highly recommend authors to double check all the expressions again. Response: Thank you for your comments. Following your comment, we have carefully checked all the expressions in the paper and corrected the errors. The revisions have been highlighted across the text. Comment 2: I would suggest that the authors should address the captions of Figs. 4-6 in detail. The captions should include the interpretation of x-axis and y-axis, the use of parameters, and the implication of lines in each figure, etc. In addition, the text size of figures is a little bit small. Therefore, I recommend that each figure should be taken separately for clear visualization and analysis. Response: Thanks for your valuable comment. Following your comment, we explained the meaning of the X-axis and Y-axis and the related parameters in the figure. In addition, we analyze each figure separately and explain the meaning of the lines in each figure. Comment 3: The authors have chosen only one set of parameters for the calculation analysis. I am curious to see how the results would change if other parameters were chosen. Response: Thank you for your valuable suggestion. Following your comment, we have added the sensitivity analysis table of related parameters, and the influence of the change of related parameters on the results is analyzed. We believe that these changes are in line with your requirements. Special thanks to you for your careful review and good comments, we hope that our modifications can meet your requirements. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: 1Response to Reviewers.doc https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254411.r004
23 Jun 2021 Decision Letter - Carlos Gracia-Lázaro, Editor PONE-D-21-07220R2 Research on the Cooperative Mechanism of Government and Enterprise for Basin Ecological Compensation Based on Differential Game PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sun, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please, pay special attention to the issues raised by Referee 1, as this may be the last opportunity to correct them. Specify in your answer the specific changes you have made about the points specified by the reviewer. Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 07 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. 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Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Comments_R2.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254411.r005
Revision 3
23 Jun 2021 Author Response Dear Editor and Reviewers: We thank you very much for your comments. We have studied comments carefully and made corrections which, we hope, have improved the quality of the paper to your satisfaction. The revisions have been highlighted across the text. Our responses to your valuable comments and the main corrections in the paper are as follows: Thank you for your comments. Following your comment, we have carefully checked all the expressions in the paper and corrected the errors. The revisions have been highlighted across the text. Special thanks to you for your careful review and good comments, we hope that our modifications can meet your requirements. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: 623Response to Reviewers.doc https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254411.r006
28 Jun 2021 Decision Letter - Carlos Gracia-Lázaro, Editor Research on the Cooperative Mechanism of Government and Enterprise for Basin Ecological Compensation Based on Differential Game PONE-D-21-07220R3 Dear Dr. Sun, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Carlos Gracia-Lázaro Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254411.r007
Formally Accepted
14 Jul 2021 Acceptance Letter - Carlos Gracia-Lázaro, Editor PONE-D-21-07220R3 Research on the Cooperative Mechanism of Government and Enterprise for Basin Ecological Compensation Based on Differential Game Dear Dr. Sun: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Carlos Gracia-Lázaro Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254411.r008

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