The impact of digital technology on the quality of herdsmen's livestock reduction and its policy implications

China's Digital Village Strategy is entering a new phase of comprehensive acceleration. Digital technologies are now deeply integrated into all facets of pastoral systems, from livestock development and herdsmen production to livelihoods and the overall transformation of pastoral areas. Against the macro-backdrop of grassland livestock reduction policies, this paper develops a game payoff matrix from the dual-game perspective of government-herdsmen interactions. This approach facilitates a mathematical analysis of the mechanisms through which digital technology enhances the quality of herd reduction practices. Simultaneously, OLS regression combined with Generalized Propensity Score Matching (GPSM) is applied to survey data from herders in the Ili region of Xinjiang. These methods empirically examine the mechanisms through which digital technology affects livestock reduction quality. The baseline regression results indicate that digital technologies significantly improve the quality of livestock reduction. This improvement is manifested in high efficiency, environmental friendliness, rational regulation, and effective supervision. The GPSM estimation results demonstrate a significant positive effect of digital technology usage intensity on livestock reduction quality, revealing an increasing marginal benefit trend. Mechanism analysis reveals that emotional social networks play a mediating role in the pathway through which digital technologies affect the quality of livestock reduction, while functional social networks do not exhibit a significant influence. Local governments should strengthen cooperative and mutually beneficial relations with herdsmen, thereby promoting the deeper integration and sustainable development of digital technologies in the livestock sector.