Currently, on the Chinese internet, the term “involution” refers to intense but meaningless competition for limited resources, also known as “the inflation of effort.” Involution is a prevalent phenomenon in various social competition scenarios and can lead to significant social contradictions. On the other hand“, lying flat” refers to a conscious choice by individuals to withdraw from intense competition and pursue a self-centered and hollow existence. The propagation of lying flat culture may lead to nihilism or irrationalism. However, existing literature on involution and lying flat has two main limitations. First, previous studies have separately examined involution and lying flat as two opposite yet closely related outcomes of intense social competition. This approach fails to provide a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of involution and lying flat in the context of increasingly fierce social competition. Second, existing literature predominantly adopts value-based payoff allocation methods, disregarding the prevalence of rank-based payoff allocation methods. Consequently, the other prevalent rank-based allocation (RA) method remains understudied. To address these limitations, we propose an evolutionary game model on a square lattice to abstract the fierce social competition between involution, cooperation, and lying flat. Our experimental results demonstrate that various factors, including social resources, the cost of involution, the relative utility of the involution strategy, and the variance of agents’ competition abilities, play distinct yet significant roles in social competition. Furthermore, these factors exhibit interaction effects on the levels of cooperation, involution, and lying flat. The rank threshold ( $T)$ positively affects the level of cooperation, exhibits a U-shaped effect on the level of lying flat, and an inverted U-shaped effect on the level of involution. The RA rule tends to result in a higher level of involution, whereas the value-based rule tends to result in a higher level of lying flat. These findings remain robust across different network sizes. Our study provides insights into strategies for suppressing the levels of involution and lying flat in social competitions.

Purpose: To promote the success of peer-to-peer accommodation, this study examines the effects of online host–guest interaction as well as the interaction's boundary conditions of listing price and reputation on listing popularity.Design/methodology/approach: Using 330,686 data collected from Airbnb in the United States of America, the authors provide empirical evidence to answer whether social-oriented self-presentation and response rate influence listing popularity from the perspective of social exchange theory (SET). In addition, the authors investigate how these two kinds of online host–guest interactions work with listing price and reputation to influence listing popularity.Findings: The results reveal the positive association between online host–guest interaction and listing popularity. Notably, the authors find that listing price strengthens but listing reputation weakens the positive effects of online host–guest interactions on listing popularity in peer-to-peer accommodation.Originality/value: This study is the first attempt to adopt SET to explain the importance of online host–guest interactions in influencing listing popularity as well as examine the moderating role of listing price and reputation on the above relationship.