Analysis and improvement of evolutionary game behavior of e-commerce supply chain considering quality sensitivity

This study investigates how consumer quality sensitivity influences quality decision-making behaviors in e-commerce supply chains. An evolutionary game model is developed to analyze the strategic interactions between manufacturers and retailers, incorporating a quality-sensitive demand function, convex quality costs, and a reputation benefit mechanism. Using survey data from 850 consumers and operational records from 320 e-commerce suppliers, numerical simulations are conducted to examine the effects of key parameters on equilibrium outcomes. The results reveal a clear threshold effect of quality sensitivity. When the sensitivity coefficient is below a critical value, the market tends to converge to a low-quality equilibrium; above this threshold, high-quality strategies become dominant. The cost structure significantly moderates strategic choices, with symmetric low costs leading to high-quality adoption rates exceeding three-quarters, while symmetric high costs reduce this proportion to below one-third. Reputation benefits accelerate convergence and substantially increase high-quality adoption, exhibiting diminishing marginal returns. Multi-factor interaction analysis further identifies synergistic effects between reputation and sensitivity, as well as between reputation and cost. Based on these findings, differentiated supervision policies for e-commerce platforms are proposed, including increased sampling inspection frequencies for high-sensitivity product categories and traffic-weighted incentives for suppliers with sustained high-quality performance.