Title: Credit games of Taobao buyers and sellers

Authors: Yang Ying; Hong-Jian Qu

Addresses: Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Longteng Road, Shanghai, Songjiang, 201620, China ' Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Longteng Road, Shanghai, Songjiang, 201620, China

Abstract: The importance of e-commerce is increasingly visible, but the credit problem is still one of the bottlenecks of its development. This paper mainly researches the credit problems of Taobao (http://www.taobao.com) buyers and sellers based on the game theory. Firstly, the seller's credit problem is due to fraud, which leads to buyers' interests damage; secondly, the buyer's credit problem is due to Taobao's introduction of freight insurance, thus buyers can return goods very easily, which influences sellers obviously. Based on that, this paper builds the game model, which sets the strategies of buyers (purchase and return, purchase and not return, not purchase) and sellers (trust, not trust), and then draw the corresponding conclusions and recommendations through the analysis, which includes improving the technology costs (X) for seller to publish false information, increasing sellers' probability (q) of being discovered for fraud, and reducing the cost (A) of sellers' return rate.

Keywords: e-commerce; Taobao buyers; Taobao sellers; credit problems; game theory; return shipping insurance; electronic commerce.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCONVC.2013.054661

International Journal of Convergence Computing, 2013 Vol.1 No.1, pp.97 - 107

Received: 25 Mar 2013
Accepted: 18 Apr 2013

Published online: 19 Jul 2014 *

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