The Optimal Control Strategy Of Service Quality Of An E-commerce Platform For Products With Time-varying Quality

With the rapid development of economy and prevalence of Internet technology,the amount of online transactions considerably increases,particularly after the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020.E-commerce platforms become an important outlet for products purchase and services experience.When the consumption mode and consumer behavior continuously evolves,digital buyers become very sensitive to not only product quality but also the excellence of the service that the e-platform can offer.Moreover,the products with time-varying quality are often purchased repetitively with a higher frequency.Poor quality of either products or services may entail unsatisfied customers or even a loss in the number of the platform’s loyal customers.This paper mainly studies the optimal control of service quality of e-commerce platform for a product with time-varying quality.Firstly,we consider a two-echelon supply chain that consists of a supplier and an e-commerce platform.A differential game model is formulated both in centralized and decentralized scenarios respectively,in which the e-commerce platform determines the service quality of the platform,and the supplier decides the commodity quality.The number of active users in the platform continuously evolves over time and is regarded as a state variable.The quality control strategies of supply chain members under different decision structures are analyzed and compared,followed by numerical analysis.Next,consumers compare the quality of platform services and products with their own reference point.We take into account the reference quality effect and derive the results from the centralized decision-making mode,decentralized decision-making mode and cost sharing mode based on Stackelberg game.The quality control strategy of supply chain members and the changes of state variables are discussed and numerically analyzed.It is found that in a finite planning cycle,the e-commerce platform and supplier,the maximizers of profit,should adopt higher platform service quality control strategy and product quality control strategy in the initial stage.The results suggest that it would exhibit a rapid growth in the number of active users of the platform in the initial stage.The increase in the reference price will stimulate the improvement of quality control strategy of supply chain members.Compared with the decentralized decision-making mode,the centralized decision-making mode selected by the e-commerce platform and supplier will be more beneficial to the supply chain.When the cost sharing mode dominated by the e-commerce platform is adopted,Pareto improvement can be achieved.When the number of active users of the platform increases,consumers will improve their expectations for the service quality and product quality of the platform.Conversely,expectations are lowered.In addition,whether or not consumers’ initial expectations for service quality and product quality of the platform are high or low,the final reference quality status under the same decision-making mode will not change.Based on the above analysis,this paper puts forward practical suggestions from multiple perspectives to provide better reference for quality control strategies for supply chain members and realize the coordinated and long-term development of supply chain.