<p>To deal with serious food security risks, the Chinese government regards farmland transfer as a significant policy instrument. But in reality, short-term and unstable farmland transfer accounts for a large proportion, which restricts the improvement of agricultural productivity. The reason might be that the bounded rationality of the stakeholders in farmland transfer makes it difficult for them to implement the optimal resource allocation. In this article, based on behavioral economics, new institutional economics and new economic sociology, a new quadripartite evolutionary game model of farmland transfer is constructed, the decision-making logics of evolutionary game participants are clarified, and the factors as well as their influencing mechanism on the evolutionary game are explored. Through modeling and simulation, the following conclusions are drawn. Firstly, the enhancement of ordinary farmers’ endowment effect of farmlands might lead them to choose short-term informal farmland transfer. Secondly, the increase in social trust and social reciprocity among ordinary farmers towards stakeholders might lead them to choose long-term formal transfer. Thirdly, the informal institutional pressure from local residents and the formal institutional pressure from food security would encourage rural collectives and local governments to take active intervention and investment measures, which could promote long-term formal farmland transfer. Then, several management measures are proposed from the perspectives of farmland transfer services, farmland trusteeship services and agricultural industrialization consortia.</p>