Abstract:

Reputation management is crucial to e-commerce platforms’ healthy and sustainable development. A positive reputation is key to these platforms’ competitive advantage and dynamic competitiveness； however， platform sellers are their main source of reputation crisis. E-commerce platforms focus on regulating sellers through a credit rating system to ensure reputation management. The centralization of the traditional credit rating system provides objective conditions for sellers to alter their ratings and distort the supply of market information. Our research innovatively describes the game relationship between consumers and sellers to outline the role of consortium blockchain in reputation management and its accompanying mechanism. Findings reveal obvious principal–agent problems in the traditional centralized credit rating system， leading to a “lose–lose” situation among platforms， sellers， and consumers. The use of consortium blockchain technology can impede sellers’ opportunistic behavior to realize a “win-win” situation for all parties. Additionally， we analyze the impacts of using consortium blockchain technology along with major parameters （e.g.， profit margin and reputation sensitivity） on sellers’ welfare. Our conclusions are verified via numerical simulation. Results offer a novel managerial view of how e-commerce platforms can leverage consortium blockchain in reputation management as well as a solution for the development of high-end e-commerce.

Key words: consortium blockchain, credit rating system, e-commerce platform, reputation management