Evolutionary game analysis on e-commerce personalization and privacy protection

Personalized products and services in e-commerce bring consumers many new experiences, but also trigger a series of information security issues. Considering the bounded rationality of the game participants, in this paper, we propose an evolutionary game model of privacy protection between firms and consumers based on e-commerce personalization. Evolutionary stable strategies (ESSs) are obtained from the equilibrium points according to the model analysis, and then simulation experiments are launched to validate the decision-making results and the influencing mechanism of various factors. The results show that the model can eventually evolve toward a win-win situation by wisely varying its various factors, such as ratios of initial strategies, cost of privacy protection, commodity prices, and other related factors. Further, we find that reducing the possibility of the privacy breach under the premise of privacy protection can help promote the e-commerce personalization.