Abstract: The organizational legitimacy spillover of industrial colleges refers to the gradual accumulation of legitimacy of their organizational structure as the scale expands. Incorporating risk preference to explore organizational legitimacy spillover, introducing rank-dependent expected utility functions to measure corporate risk preference, and performing nonlinear transformations on the probabilities of utility outcomes after ranking through decision weights, thereby constructing an RDEU game model. This model analyzes the existence conditions of the game equilibrium for leading and following enterprises under different risk preferences and the influence laws of the risk characteristics of both parties on the equilibrium. The study finds that when the benefits are greater than the costs, regardless of the risk preference, there exist pure strategy equilibrium of "sharing" and "imitating" which are conducive to promoting the legitimacy spillover of industrial colleges; when the benefits are less than the costs, the risk attributes have a significant impact on the game equilibrium. Specifically, when the leading enterprise is rational, the following enterprise determines the unique equilibrium solution based on the risk attributes of the leading enterprise. Similarly, the leading enterprise will also change its own decisions based on the risk attributes and decisions of the following enterprise. If the following enterprise is risk-averse, the leading enterprise tends to choose the "sharing" strategy; if the following enterprise is risk-seeking, the leading enterprise tends to choose the "precautionary" strategy. When both are irrational, being risk-averse is conducive to advancing the legitimacy spillover of industrial colleges, while being risk-seeking hinders it. When one is risk-averse and the other is not, the equilibrium of the latter is greater than that when both are rational. Based on this, relevant countermeasures and suggestions are proposed from the perspective of risk preference to promote the legitimacy spillover of industrial colleges, in the hope of providing a reference for advancing the high-quality development of industrial colleges.

Key words: Industry College, legitimacy spillover, rank-dependent expected utility, game theory model, Nash equilibrium