Abstract: In recent years, the Chinese government has attached great importance to the development of the data element market, and the scale of the data element market has expanded rapidly. At the same time, there are several problems in China's data element market, such as insufficient supply, poor quality, difficulty in pricing, low proportion of on-exchange trading, high compliance risks in off-exchange trading, imbalance in market supply and demand, and low allocation efficiency of data products. Therefore, studying the mechanism by which compliance governance and quality control operate in the current environment to influence the selection of sales channels for data products is of significant theoretical and practical importance for optimizing the business strategies of data product trading entities and enhancing the market management of data trading departments. The data supply chain in off-exchange trading is composed of a data manufacturer and a data seller. The data manufacturer produces both high-quality and low-quality data products that can replace each other. Due to the lack of effective regulatory measures, the manufacturer has the behavior of “shoddy” which sell both high-quality and low-quality data products to the sellers at the same wholesale price. The seller then sells to the customer at the same retail price. In the on-exchange trading, the data supply chain is composed of a data manufacturer, a data seller and a data trading organization. The data manufacturer sells data products to data sellers, who then sell data products through the data trading organization. Through compliance inputs, the data trading organization identifies and processes low-quality data products sold due to “shoddy” by the manufacturer. This paper studies the decision-making mechanism of data product quality under different sales channels. A centralized decision-making method is adopted to solve the equilibrium value of variables related to sales channel selection of data product, and the following conclusions are obtained through analysis: (1) In off-exchange trading, the structure and production costs of high-quality and low-quality data products jointly determine the development of the sales channels for data products, an increase in the degree of demand suppression for low-quality data products will lead to a decline in the profits of data product manufacturing and sales enterprises. (2) In on-exchange trading, an increase in the quality control level of data product manufacturers and the cost of compliance governance by data trading institutions will both lead to a decline in the profits of data product production and sales enterprises. (3) The demand for data products in on-exchange trading is higher than that in off-exchange trading, and the profits of data product manufacturers and data product sellers are also higher in on-exchange trading than in off-exchange trading. The stable development of the data element market requires the effective synergy between “quality control” and “compliance governance”. Through theoretical modeling and analysis, the research results provides a theoretical basis for the government to optimize the regulatory system and for enterprises to formulate differentiated channel strategies.

Key words: data product, compliance governance, quality control, sales channel selection