The era of zero-sum competition calls for e-commerce platforms to shift focus toward micro-market resilience. Existing research has split into two traditions: diagnostic studies offer detailed analyses of market failure but lack systemic application, while engineering studies develop deployable tools yet suffer from opaque mechanisms and hidden risks. This paper proposes the Signal–Belief–Decision (SBD) framework to bridge this divide, with the Signal layer transforming private information into verifiable public knowledge, the Belief layer aggregating dispersed signals into shared consensus, and the Decision layer encoding enforceable rules for incentive compatibility. Using an extended signaling game, we diagnose six vulnerability dimensions (VD1–VD6) that destabilize markets. Agent-based modeling then allows us to distill four design principles (DP1–DP4) that inform governance configuration. The SBD framework provides a middle-range theoretical architecture that reorients platform governance from reactive tooling to proactive, consumer-centric design.
Zhong et al. (Thu,) studied this question.