Evolutionary game analysis of quality regulation in live streaming e-commerce: insights from China

Despite repeated regulatory interventions, product quality scandals persist in China’s live streaming e-commerce market, severely eroding consumer trust and hindering industry sustainability. To investigate the systemic roots of these challenges, this study develops a four-party game model involving streamers, manufacturers, platforms, and consumers to explore their strategic choices. Unlike prior tripartite models, this study offers two novel insights: (1) explicitly modeling manufacturers’ production decisions, revealing key incentives for non-self-disciplined practices; (2) integrating empirical observations with game-theoretic simulation, bridging the theory-practice gap in extant studies. Numerical simulations coupled with empirical observations of representative quality incidents reveal a previously underexplored phenomenon: the interdependent relationships between platforms and top-tier streamers may induce platforms’ negative supervision behaviors when streamers practice loose product selection. Such a permissive environment can encourage manufacturers’ non-self-disciplined production practices, enabling substandard products to enter the market through streamers’ amplified influence, constituting a critical determinant of recurrent quality crises. Key findings demonstrate: (1) Platforms’ regulatory intensity should be optimally maintained at a moderate level; (2) Reducing platform dependence on top-tier streamers can enhance their regulatory autonomy; (3) Consumers’ active defense generates reputation pressure that may incentive platforms and streamers to alter loose practices, partially mitigating quality risks, when sustained public engagement occurs.