Research On Product Quality Control Of Online Shopping Based On Evolutionary Game Theory

Because of the convenience, fast, low price and a rich variety of products, online shopping has been welcomed by the majority of consumers, especially young consumers. Meanwhile, in order to play e-commerce’s important role in the development of economic, several Chinese state ministries have issued a number of regulatory documents and standards to encourage and support online shopping. The strong market demand and tolerant policy environment promote the rapid development of China’s online shopping market for many years. Online shopping brings convenience and saves lots of time and cost for consumers. However, with the explosive development of online shopping, many problems such as fake and inferior products have been increasingly prominent. The participants of online shopping have been noticed those problems in the online shopping and taken many measures to alleviate them. Unfortunately, the masses of online sellers make it very difficult to manage and control the product quality in online shopping market. What’s worse, in China, the current social credit system is far from mature and the market economy system is not perfect either. Although many measures have been taken, online product quality problem remains serious.Researching on online shopping, arming at the increasingly prominent online product quality problem, this article constructs an evolutionary game model between online shopping platform and online sellers. Firstly, based on analyzing the current situation of China’s online product quality control, this research proposes an evolutionary game model. On the basis of input-output ratio of online product quality cost, the platforms and the sellers are classified into three groups respectively. Each of the group is analyzed by evolutionary game theory in turn, and various kinds of strategy evolution pattern are explored. The results show that, there’s a very close relationship between the strategy choice of game players and input-output ratio of online product quality cost. If there’s a very low input-output ratio of online product quality investment, the game player will not spend on the product quality in spite of the game’s initial condition. If there’s a very high input-output ratio, then no matter what the initial condition is, the game player will ensure the attention and investment to the online product quality. While, if the input-output ratio of online product quality investment is at a medium level, there’s no evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) for the game, and the strategy game process will fall into a condition of circular waves. Secondly, a new variable of government regulation is put in the game model of online shopping platforms and online sellers. The analyzing of the new evolutionary game model shows that government regulators’ punishment measure could prompt the online platform and sellers increase the input of quality and improve the quality of online shopping product. However, the current penalties of Chinese regulator on the online illegal behaviors, especially the online platforms’ illegal behaviors, are too light. And that weakens the effect of government regulatory. Finally, in order to verify the rationality of the research conclusions, a simulation of Vensim PLE 6.0b software is applied to the evolutionary game model. The simulation results are consistent with the results of analysis in this paper.In this paper, the evolutionary game theory was applied to the research of online shopping product quality control, and that had broadened the application field of evolutionary game theory. Through the evolutionary game analysis between online platforms and online sellers, this paper revealed the evolutionary processes and evolution rules of online shopping product quality control. Obviously, the findings in this paper are of great significance for China’s online shopping product quality control.