关键词: 外卖食品安全监管, 消费者参与行为, 三方演化博弈, 仿真分析

Abstract: Food safety, as a significant issue concerning public health and social stability, has always garnered extensive attention from various sectors of society. In recent years, with the rapid development of information technology and the acceleration of life pace, the takeout catering industry has emerged as a formidable force, becoming an indispensable part of urban life. However, the rapid expansion of this industry has been accompanied by frequent exposures of food safety issues in takeouts, such as unknown sources of ingredients, unsanitary processing environments and food contamination during delivery. These issues have severely infringed upon consumers’ rights and interests, triggered deep concerns among the public regarding food safety and prompted unprecedented attention from the government and various sectors of society. In the field of food safety regulation, although academia has conducted extensive research, much of this has focused on traditional offline catering industries and online food sales platforms. In contrast, there is a lack of in-depth and systematic exploration of the emerging regulatory mechanisms for takeout food safety. This research gap not only limits our comprehensive understanding of takeout food safety issues but also hampers the government’s ability to formulate effective regulatory policies. Therefore, this study aims to construct a multi-agent interaction mechanism model for takeout food safety regulation, thoroughly analyzing the strategic choices and dynamic interaction processes among government regulatory departments, takeout platforms and takeout merchants. Additionally, it examines the potential impact of consumer participation on takeout food safety regulation.
This study innovatively introduces the theory of tripartite evolutionary game, regarding government regulatory departments, takeout platforms and takeout merchants as game entities with autonomous decision-making capabilities, while fully considering the role of consumers as an external supervisory force. By constructing an evolutionary game model incorporating these three entities and their interactions, we analyze the stability conditions of each entity under different strategic choices and utilize numerical simulation techniques to delve into the impact of key parameters,such as regulatory costs, reward and punishment intensities and consumer participation, on the evolutionary process of the game. The research results indicate that within the complex dynamic system of takeout food safety regulation, there exist three distinct stable states. The first state involves government regulatory departments adopting strict regulatory measures, while takeout platforms relatively relax their oversight, leading takeout merchants to choose unsafe production due to the lack of effective constraints. The second state is characterized by government regulatory departments relaxing their oversight, with takeout platforms actively assuming the responsibility of strict regulation, and yet takeout merchants still opting for unsafe production. The third state, which is the most ideal, features government regulatory departments maintaining strict oversight, takeout platforms moderately relaxing their supervision (as the platforms’ regulatory responsibilities are relatively reduced under the government’s strict oversight), and takeout merchants choosing safe production under regulatory pressure. For this third stable state, this study further discovers that by increasing the rewards and penalties for takeout merchants, as well as enhancing consumer participation and supervisory capabilities, takeout merchants can be effectively incentivized to improve their safety production standards. This finding not only provides a theoretical basis for the government to formulate more precise regulatory policies but also points in the direction for takeout platforms and merchants to enhance their food safety management levels.
In summary, this study not only enriches the theoretical system in the field of food safety regulation and provides new perspectives and methods for takeaway food safety regulation, but also provides valuable theoretical references and practical guidance for the government, takeaway platforms and merchants in their strategic choices in food safety management. With the continuous development of the takeaway food and beverage industry, the results of this research are expected to contribute significantly to the construction of a safer, healthier and more sustainable takeaway market environment.

Key words: takeaway food safety regulation, customer participation behavior, three-party evolutionary game, numerical simulation