Collaborative Governance of Involutionary Competition in Platform Economy Under Traffic Contestation: A Case Study of China’s Food Delivery Platforms

Counterfeit Governance Strategies in E-Commerce Platforms from a Systems Perspective: An Evolutionary Game and System Dynamics Approach

Background: Counterfeit governance in e-commerce platforms is a real-world problem characterized by strategic interdependence, information asymmetry and dynamic feedback among platforms, merchants and consumers. Linear or single-actor regulatory approaches are often insufficient to address such complexity, as platform regulation, merchant behaviour, consumer trust and online reputation mechanisms jointly shape the evolution of market trust. Methods: Guided by systems thinking, this study conceptualizes counterfeit governance as a socio-technical system and develops a tripartite evolutionary game model involving e-commerce platforms, merchants and consumers. The model delineates the system boundary around transaction-stage platform governance and incorporates key variables, including regulatory costs, fraudulent gains, honest transaction costs, subsidies, penalties, consumer transaction costs, online word-of-mouth influence and reputation losses. System dynamics simulation using Vensim PLE 10.5.2 is then employed to examine evolutionary trajectories, local stability, parameter sensitivity and threshold regions. Results: The results show that weak or static regulation may allow fraudulent strategies to persist or fluctuate, whereas stronger penalties and subsidies for honest transactions can reshape the payoff structure and promote merchant integrity. Transaction-related consumer incentives and enhanced online word-of-mouth mechanisms support consumer trust and stabilize the system toward trustworthy transactions. Conclusions: This study operationalizes systems thinking through system dynamics, while evolutionary game theory provides behavioural micro-foundations for stakeholder strategy adjustment in digital platform governance.

Striving for Fair Governance: A Multi-Case Study Comparison of Platform Cooperatives and Market-Leading Platforms

Over the past decade, multiple governance failures in market-leading platforms have caused severe criticism from partners, customers, and regulators. This has led to the formation of an alternative concept called platform cooperatives, which are jointly owned and democratically controlled by partners and aim to create a more just and social alternative to dominating market leaders. Using a comparative multi-case study of six matching pairs of platforms across different industries, this study explores how governance differs between platform types and how this impacts platform strategies. The results show that platform governance varies strongly between platform cooperatives and traditional platforms across the four governance dimensions investigated: values, economics, authority, and cooperation. These differences directly limit the strategic option space available for platform cooperatives and decrease the feasibility of success when competing with well-established players. Our findings contribute to the understanding of platform governance and platform cooperatives and can pave the way for future research in this field.

Escape From the Competition: How Fair Competition Policy Influences Corporate ESG Behavior

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance serves not only as a response to urgent climate risks but also as a strategic tool for sustainable value creation. However, the rise in greenwashing suggests gaps in existing governance frameworks. This study examines the Fair Competition Review System (FCRS), a policy aimed at mitigating administrative monopolies by emphasizing market mechanisms. Unlike prior research that focuses primarily on firm‐level factors or macroeconomic interventions, this study situates FCRS within the framework of new institutional economics, constructing a causal chain from institutional pressures to corporate responses. Empirical results demonstrate that the FCRS significantly drives ESG behavior. Mechanism analysis identifies three key pathways: stimulation of green innovation, reduction of financing costs, and optimization of income distribution, each grounded in reduced institutional transaction costs. Further analysis underscores the importance of synergistic governance and highlights several factors that enhance policy effectiveness, including equity incentive systems, audit committees, regional rule‐of‐law environments, and digital infrastructure. A particularly novel finding is that identical external institutional pressures can lead to both substantive ESG implementation and strategic brownwashing, a phenomenon previously underexplored. This study extends the scope of institutional economics and refines the framework for understanding ESG performance drivers. Practically, it offers policymakers and enterprise leaders a roadmap for leveraging institutional pressures to achieve sustainable competitive advantages.

Can the e-commerce platform escape the trap of fake reviews? The evidence from tripartite evolutionary game

An Empirical Study on the Regulatory Path and Legal Application of Platform Monopoly Behavior from the Perspective of Commercial Law in the Context of the Digital Economy

To address the concealed nature of platform monopoly behavior and the limited efficiency of commercial-law implementation in the digital economy, this paper constructs an empirical framework for regulatory path analysis and legal application. First, a three-dimensional “subject-behavior-responsibility” framework is developed to define platforms as providers of commercial public infrastructure and clarify their fiduciary duties. Second, 63 typical platform monopoly cases from 2018 to 2024 are collected and coded, covering e-commerce, social media, search, logistics, and online travel platforms across multiple jurisdictions. Third, a dual-test model of “behavioral harm-efficiency defense” is constructed, introducing indicators such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and price transmission elasticity to quantify competitive harm and efficiency justification. Finally, three regulatory paths—ex-ante obligation, ex-post punishment, and commitment to rectification—are compared through a matching matrix. The results show that the ex-ante obligation path achieves a 95% identification rate, a 4.2-month enforcement cycle, and a 14.3% recurrence rate, outperforming alternative paths. The findings support fiduciary-duty-based regulation for platform monopoly governance.

From Shirking to Sharing: Evolutionary Game Analysis of Responsibility Mechanisms in Digital Environmental Governance

A role-based evolutionary game model is constructed to examine how governments and enterprises adjust responsibility strategies under bounded rationality and shows two possible stable outcomes—mutual responsibility fulfillment and mutual shirking—with threshold-sensitive dynamics.