Literature review
The online shopping method has been widely favored by consumers because of its convenience, but the quality problems of the products that come with it are also criticized. The quality of online shopping products is one of the most popular hot issues in China's e-commerce field, which has aroused widespread concern from the government and the whole society.
Online shopping has made consumer shopping break through the limitations of time and space, but it also brings difficulties to consumer decision-making. An e-commerce environment results in information asymmetry because buyers cannot communicate the quality of products and easily assess the trustworthiness of sellers [3]. Consumers abandon their online purchases at an e-commerce website partly due to the lack of information transparency of the website [4]. In order to retain consumers, online vendors can effectively overcome product-level uncertainty by taking advantage of retailer reputation in the physical world and through the use of digitized video commercials [5]. However, although information asymmetry leads consumers to have less trust in the quality of online shopping products, but there are indeed some consumers who have demand for fake and shoddy products [6]. This consumer demand has created a convergence effect in the online shopping market, which will attract low quality businesses and products into the market [7]. Therefore, with the popularity of online shopping, more and more consumers choose online shopping, and the problem of products quality is also becoming more and more serious.
At present, how to deal with the problem of online shopping products quality has become a hot spot, which has aroused the attention of many scholars. Some scholars have discussed the countermeasures of this problem from the perspective of supply chain. The buyer can induce higher product quality from the risk-neutral supplier than from the risk-averse supplier by conveying the external failures due to returns more effectively to the supplier [8]. Moreover, two common contracts are offered by e-tailers to manufacturers: the revenue sharing contract where a platform appropriates a portion of the manufacturer’s revenue, and the fixed fee contract where a platform charges a fixed rent for each sale. Compared with the revenue sharing scheme, the fixed fee scheme leads to a higher price, a higher quality, and a (weakly) smaller market size [9]. It is well known that product quality and environmental conditions fluctuate over time. It is necessary to design a closed-loop supply chain planning framework to deal with such fluctuations [10]. The seller knows most of the information about the product, so reducing seller fraud is critical. Seller-buyer closeness degree-based reputation system can be used to detect fraud products and sellers and elsewhere reduce the fraudulent activities in e-commerce [11]. Supply chain management (SCM) consists of internal practices, which are contained within a firm, and external practices, which cross organizational boundaries integrating a firm with its customers and suppliers. Supplier quality management and customer focus are two QM practices that are also clearly in the domain of SCM [12]. This shows that, improve the quality of the main body of the supply chain, can effectively improve the quality of products.
However, in a highly competitive market environment, the participating entities are often driven by interests, adopting some negative strategies or even illegal activities, and relying solely on the self-restraint of the participating entities cannot effectively guarantee the quality of online shopping products. Therefore, some scholars believe that in addition to the low level of product quality efforts from sellers and product suppliers, the lack of effective supervision of product quality is also one of the main reasons for online shopping product quality problem. The e-commerce platform plays the most important role and it is the key for the smooth operation of the three-level product quality control system. The e-commerce platform also controls and guides the seller's activities of mitigating product quality uncertainty and improves the quality of products [13]. However, government quality supervision department and e-commerce platforms will be affected by factors such as regulatory costs, penalties, profits, and awards when determining regulatory strategies [14]. Other than this, third-party product evaluation agencies undertake the task of checking and testing product quality in the market, establish the quality level of products, and pass information to consumers [15].
In fact, consumers, as buyers of online shopping green products, play an important role in the online shopping process. When the consumer is dissatisfied with the product, he or she will choose to return it to the seller. Return management can affect the repurchase behavior of consumers, and repurchase behavior will affect the return management process [16]. Consumer attitudes toward online shopping is determined by trust and perceived benefits [17], perceived quality is influenced by the perceptions of competitive price and website reputation, which in turn influences perceived value; perceived value, website reputation, and perceived risk influence online trust, which in turn influence repurchase intention [18]. In addition, consumers as the ultimate experience of online shopping products have the right to feedback on the quality of products, based on consumer evaluation and e-commerce reputation mechanism to study the quality of online shopping products can be an effective complement to existing research. Social control, including consumer evaluation, will inhibit sellers’ opportunistic behavior [19]. As a weaker party, consumers should make full use of the online reputation system to make real evaluations and alleviate the losses caused by information asymmetry to the entire consumer group [20]. Considering the profit-seeking nature of each participating subject, collusion problems often occur during the game. The research on collusion is mainly reflected in the networks [21] and pricing [22]. In the field of e-commerce, reputation management systems can be used to reduce the spoofing rating caused by collusion by malicious users [23].
In summary, the existing research focuses on the relationship between government and e-commerce platform or e-commerce platform and online seller. Even though some papers consider multiple participants related to online shopping green product quality supervision, there are few papers that incorporate all parties into the same regulatory system to analyze their relationship with each other, especially those involving conspiracy between participants. At the same time, consumers, as the main body of online shopping, play an important role in the quality supervision of online shopping green products. Most of the existing studies have analyzed the impact of consumers on the reputation construction of the e-commerce platform and the online seller, but have not focused on the role of consumers in the regulatory system. Therefore, this paper considers the loss-sharing relationship between the e-commerce platform and the online seller and the collusion behavior between them. It constructs an evolutionary game model among government supervision department, e-commerce platform and online seller, and introduces consumer feedback in the model. It also analyses the strategic choice and evolutionary trend of participants under different conditions and the indirect regulatory role of consumers. Finally, using Matlab 2017 to carry out simulation analysis, put forward the countermeasures and suggestions on how to deal with the quality problems of online shopping green products.