Abstract: Quality incidents, such as food, drug, online meal ordering, still happened in recent years. Existing literature generally proposes that the high-quality product cannot be realized without the governmental regulation. In fact, subject to the insufficient resources, single measure of regulation, and increasingly complex and heavy tasks, it is difficult for government to implement effective regulation. Therefore, other factors are important supplements to the governmental regulation. Media, consumers, and industry associations are generally regarded as participants in regulation, which neglects internal supervision resources in enterprise. Compared with external factors, employees with specialized knowledge can obtain more quality information from enterprise. A lot of quality incidents have shown that employees, also known as whistle-blowers, have a positive influence on discovering quality problems and promoting effective regulation. Studying employee’s behaviors in quality whistle-blowing and analyzing the behavioral interaction among employee and other external factors are practical and urgent issues that have been seldom researched.
In light of the motivation above, a tripartite evolutionary game model considering enterprise, government, employee and media is constructed to analyze the effect of internal employee whistle-blowing on product quality regulation. Firstly, we assume that the strategy sets of government, enterprise, and employee are (strict regulation, not strict regulation), (self-disciplined, not self-disciplined), and (whistleblowing, not whistleblowing), respectively. In the game model, the participation of media is assumed as exogenous variable. Secondly, pay-off matrix of game system is presented. Considering the risk preference of employee in whistleblowing process, Prospect Value Function is applied to adjust the payoff function of internal employees. Thirdly, the replication dynamic equation of government, enterprise and employee is presented. We solve equilibrium strategies of the game model through simulation, in which the influence of the main parameters in pay-off function on strategy selection of each factor is analyzed. Specifically, simulation research analyzes the parameters influencing behavior of employee, and the influencing mechanism of employees’ strategy selection on government and enterprise. Finally, the case of Changsheng Vaccine incident are introduced to verify the result of simulation.
According to the model analysis, the participation of internal employees in the quality regulation is a beneficial supplement to external supervision system dominated by the government, which alleviates the low efficiency of regulation caused by information asymmetry. The research results show that: (1)Legal and organizational protection is the key factor affecting the whistleblowing behavior of internal employees. Whether an employee’s whistleblowing plays a supervisory role in quality regulation is not only influenced by personal factors, but also by media intervention and the illegal cost of enterprises. (2)The whistleblowing of internal employee could change the strategy selection of individual enterprises in the short term, but its lasting deterrent effect on the enterprise cannot be achieved without the joint effect of illegal costs and media supervision. (3)Employee whistleblowing could attract local government attention to quality problems of individual manufacturers in the short term, but it cannot motivate the regulatory behavior of local government in a long term.
This paper applies Prospect Value Theory to the model and explains the whistleblowing behavior of employees from the perspective of evolutionary game. Further research direction can refine the research on employee whistleblowing behavior, such as taking into account factors such as ethics, national culture, and organizational justice in game models, which can enhance the explanatory power of the model results.

Key words: product quality supervision; internal employee; evolutionary game

摘要： 已有研究认为政府监管和企业自律是实现有效产品质量监管的重要因素,在这基础上引入内部员工这一监督力量,构建了媒体参与下政府、企业、内部员工三方演化博弈模型,并引入前景价值函数对内部员工的收益进行修正,探讨了内部员工吹哨行为对产品质量监管的影响。研究表明,内部员工吹哨是对以政府为主体外部监管体系的有益补充,在一定程度上缓解了由信息不对称造成的政府监管效能低下的问题;内部员工吹哨是否能够发挥对企业和政府的监督作用除了受到自身举报意愿影响外,还受到违法成本和媒体报道等外部因素的影响。结合长生疫苗案例,阐述了产品质量监管中内部员工吹哨对企业和政府策略选择的影响路径。最后,提出了激励内部员工参与产品质量监管、形成产品质量监管多方合力的相关建议。

关键词: 产品质量监管, 内部员工, 演化博弈