Quality supervision game between government and online shopping platforms

Abstract

In recent years, the high incidence of product quality problems in online shopping has negatively affected the normal and orderly operation of the online shopping market. In order to probe for ways for the governmental quality supervision department and the online shopping platform to implement effective supervision over online shopping, this paper builds a supervision game model between the governmental quality supervision department and the online shopping platform based on complete information, and thereby analyses the supervision game process and equilibrium state of the governmental quality supervision department and the platform in online shopping. The result shows that the supervision effectiveness of the governmental quality supervision department and the platform is subject to such main factors as the costs of the governmental supervision; the punishments to the governmental quality supervision department due to its failure to supervise; the costs, profits and awards for the online shopping platform when performing its quality control duties; and the punishments and losses that the online shopping platform will incur for failing to perform its quality control duties.

Keywords:

• government
• online shopping platform
• supervision
• control
• game theory
• Nash equilibrium

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The paper is supported by the Research Projects of the Social Science and Humanity on Schemed Fund of the Ministry of Education [No. 14Y630065] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 71472111].