Trustworthiness two-way games via margin policy in e-commerce platforms

摘要

The portability and low cost of e-commerce platforms have attracted more and more businesses and consumers. However, due to the virtual nature of e-commerce platforms, there is a serious information asymmetry between merchants and consumers–resulting in a serious credit problem of e-commerce platforms. The trust crisis remains a challenging issue for the development of e-commerce. Existing researches propose to strengthen trust supervision to protect the consumers. However, the trust crisis often hurts multiple parties’ interests. We can neither attribute the cause of dishonest transactions to a single party, nor supervise only a single party. To solve the problem of commercial breach of trust, we propose a margin policy-based consumer-to-business-to-consumer (or MP-C2B2C) model for e-commerce platforms. First, we add a third-party platform supervision mechanism to the C2C e-commerce model by presenting different margin policies. Second, we give the unit price trading mode, dual price trading mode and consumer reporting behavior mode under the margin policies based on two-way games. We investigate the game strategies of each participant in the e-commerce transaction process under MP-C2B2C model by comparing them with different representative game models. The research results show that participants in the transaction will be influenced by the margin system to choose the game strategy with better trustworthiness. Trustworthiness of the e-commerce platform is enhanced under the MP-C2B2C model.