University engineering capstone projects involve sustained interaction among students, faculty, and industry sponsors whose objectives are only partially aligned. While capstones are widely used in engineering education, existing analyses typically treat stakeholder behavior informally or descriptively, leaving incentive conflicts, information asymmetries, and strategic dependencies underexplored. This paper develops a formal game-theoretic framework that models capstone projects as a sequential Bayesian game involving three players: the university, the industry sponsor, and the student team. The framework is intended as an analytical and explanatory tool for understanding how institutional policy choices, such as grading structures, intellectual property rules, and sponsor engagement expectations, shape stakeholder behavior and project outcomes, rather than as a calibrated or predictive model. The university acts as a constrained Stackelberg leader by committing to course policies and assessment structures while anticipating strategic responses by sponsors and students under incomplete information. Reduced-form outcome functions capture technical quality, documentation quality, timeliness, alignment with sponsor needs, and publishability, while payoff functions reflect stakeholder-specific objectives and costs. Under standard assumptions, the model admits stable equilibrium regimes that correspond to empirically recognizable capstone dynamics observed in practice, including cooperative engagement, sponsor-dominated exploitation, and student grade gaming. Rather than claiming precise prediction, the framework provides a structured basis for reasoning about incentive design, policy tradeoffs, and structural failure modes in project-based learning environments, as well as for future extensions incorporating richer dynamics, repeated interaction, and empirical calibration.

翻译：大学工程专业的毕业设计项目涉及学生、教师和行业赞助方之间的持续互动，这些参与者的目标仅部分一致。尽管毕业设计在工程教育中被广泛采用，但现有分析通常非正式或描述性地处理利益相关者行为，对激励冲突、信息不对称和战略依赖性的探讨不足。本文构建了一个正式的博弈论框架，将毕业设计项目建模为一个涉及三个参与者的序贯贝叶斯博弈：大学、行业赞助方和学生团队。该框架旨在作为一种分析和解释工具，用于理解制度性政策选择（如评分结构、知识产权规则和赞助方参与期望）如何塑造利益相关者行为和项目成果，而非作为经过校准或具有预测性的模型。大学作为受约束的斯塔克尔伯格领导者，通过预先设定课程政策和评估结构，同时预测赞助方和学生在不完全信息下的战略反应。简化形式的结果函数捕捉了技术质量、文档质量、及时性、与赞助方需求的契合度以及可发表性，而收益函数则反映了各利益相关者特定的目标和成本。在标准假设下，该模型允许存在稳定的均衡状态，这些状态对应于实践中观察到的、经验上可识别的毕业设计动态，包括合作性参与、赞助方主导的利用行为以及学生的分数博弈策略。该框架并不声称能进行精确预测，而是为基于项目的学习环境中激励设计、政策权衡和结构性失效模式的推理提供了一个结构化基础，同时也为未来纳入更丰富的动态性、重复互动和实证校准的扩展研究提供了基础。