An Evolutionary Game Model for Online Food Safety Governance Under Two Different Circumstances

Online food safety governance has received significant attention in recent years. In this research, a two-stage online food safety governance model, single governance mode (SGM), and co-governance mode (CGM) were constructed to explore governance performance. Results showed that under SGM, although the platforms could regulate enterprises' illegal behavior to a certain extent by increasing the discovery probability and increasing punishment, once the platforms relaxed supervision, enterprises' behavior would tend to choose the strategy of selling unsafe food. Therefore, the effect of platforms single governance was not ideal. Results also showed that the performance of CGM was not necessarily better than SGM. When the co-governance mode met the following two conditions, food enterprises in the online market would continue selling safe food: (1) the loss caused by government supervision to the illegal enterprises was greater than the difference between the cost of the enterprises to sell safe food and unsafe food; (2) the loss caused by the co-governance of the platforms and the government to the illegal enterprises was greater than the difference between the cost of the enterprises to sell safe food and unsafe food, meanwhile, the penalty imposed by the government on the passive platforms was greater than the supervision cost input of active platforms. The research revealed that the sufficient supply of safe food in the online market under CGM might depend significantly on the intensity of government supervision and the punishment of government to enterprises and platforms. Under CGM, compared with platform sectors, government supervision might play a more significant role in promoting food safety in the online market.