Research On The Effectiveness Of Online Shopping Platform Reputation Mechanism And Credit Regulation

With the rapid development of the platform economy in the internet era,online shopping has become a "new growth point" for economic growth,and has brought up new demands for regulation.Various e-commerce platforms represented by Taobao and JD have become an indispensable part of residents’ lives.However,due to online trading platforms is a lemon market,there are lots of inferior goods disrupting the market’s normal operation,which can’t adapt to growing demands of high-quality products from consumers.Reputation mechanism has been used by some online shopping platforms as an important means to solve the lemon market problem,but the behavior of false transaction causes the market failure risk of the reputation mechanism.Credit is the foundation of a market economy,and building a new type of credit-based regulation mechanism will help solve the problem of reputation mechanism failure.Based on the above background,this thesis begins with the problem of reputation mechanism failure,and uses the dual signal recognition game between shops,platforms and consumers to study the causes of quality signal distortion and reputation mechanism failure.In addition,this thesis proves that the credit status has a significant impact on the effectiveness of the reputation mechanism by empirical analysis,which provides a theoretical basis for the following research on credit regulation.Thus,a collaborative governance structure for improving product quality level based on credit regulation is proposed,which provides some policy suggestions for quality governance.The main component of this thesis is as the follows:1.Analyze the reputation mechanism’s function and the demand for credit regulation in online shopping.Due to the behavior of false transaction,the reputation mechanism can’t recognize the quality.This article explains the reason of reputation mechanism failure from three aspects: reputation signals can’t be transmitted accurately,platform transactions are dominated by non-repetitive games,and high search costs disturb the transmission of reputation signal,which demonstrated the necessity of credit regulation systematically.2.Construct a dual signal recognition game model for shops,platforms and consumers under incomplete information.Through the game analysis,it proves that the possibility of platforms and shops lying to consumers is the main reason for the distortion of quality signal and the failure of reputation mechanism.Optimizing the structure of platforms’ recommendation fees,ameliorating guarantee systems,and strengthening competition can encourage shops to report true quality information and improve product quality effectively.3.Complete the empirical research on the influential factors of the effectiveness of reputation mechanism.This thesis uses python to crawl the information of massage chairs’ sales data from Taobao and JD websites.The result shows that effectiveness of the reputation mechanism is significantly affected by the certification mechanism and credit status.In the platform environment with high reputation and credit level,the reputation mechanism plays a more significant role in promoting product quality,otherwise,the reputation mechanism can’t play a better role.These studies provide policy inspiration for strengthening credit regulation.4.Propose a diversified collaborative governance structure based on credit regulation.Based on credit regulation,the core idea of multiple collaborative governance structure is that taking full advantage of market mechanisms,government regulation and social forces which are active roles in the construction of social credit system and product quality regulation,creating a fair and competitive market environment by credit regulation system,and achieving the goal of product quality governance ultimately.Based on the above research,the innovations of this thesis are mainly reflected as the following three aspects:1.Systematically study the failure of reputation mechanism and the way to deal with it.Based on the basic characteristics of the online shopping platform and the functioning mechanism of the reputation mechanism,this thesis analyzes the potential failure risk of reputation mechanism in platform transactions and proves that credit status has a significant impact on the reputation mechanism by game analysis and empirical research.Thus,the thesis proposes a collaborative governance structure of product quality based on credit regulation,which provides policy suggestion for governing the goods quality of online shopping platforms better.2.A dual signal recognition game of shops,platforms and consumers is constructed.This thesis researched the importance of platform’s intermediary role in the game of incomplete information between buyers and sellers,using the dual signal identification game to prove that it is platforms’ tolerance of low-quality goods that distorts the quality signals and leads to the phenomenon of bad money drives out good money.The thesis also shows that recommendation fee and guarantee systems affect the choice of shops,then some suggestions such as optimizing the platform trading rules and increasing the competition between platforms which use market-based means to achieve platforms’ goods quality governance are proposed.3.The effectiveness of certification mechanism and credit status on the reputation mechanism failure has been tested by empirical research.The thesis uses large sample data to prove that credit status influents the effectiveness of reputation mechanism significantly.By comparing the regression results from the Taobao and JD samples,it is found that under the platform environment with different business strategies,running models and credit levels,the effects of reputation mechanisms and certification mechanisms are significantly different,and it proves that the reputation mechanism from platforms with higher reputations will have more significant effectiveness.