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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1457340
This article is part of the Research Topic Toward a Decision-Centric Precision Public Health: Clinical, Operational, and Analytical Advances View all 12 articles
Research on the Quality Supervision Strategy of Drugs Sold on the Internet under the MAH system
Provisionally accepted- 1 School of Management, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, China
- 2 School of Public Health, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China
- 3 School of Public Health, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China
- 4 School of Public Health, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, China
In recent years, purchasing medications online has become increasingly popular. However, occasional quality issues have arisen with drugs bought online. As a result, we need effective quality monitoring of medicines sold online. To address this issues, several countries have begun to implement the Marketing Authorization Holder (MAH) system to enhance drug quality control. Consequently, this paper develops a four-party evolutionary game model that includes the government, holder, agent seller and third-party platform in pharmaceutical online sales, and use Matlab 2022b to carry out numerical simulation,and to compare and analyze the influence of different factors on the strategy selection of the main body of the game by changing parameters.This paper is based on the multi-party game perspective, constructed a hierarchical model,thereby better exploring the mechanism of drug quality regulation in the context of drug online sales under the MAH system. Findings suggest that reducing operational costs motivates agent sellers to adopt stable, honest strategies. Increased government penalties expedite the adoption of positive strategies by sellers, holders, and third-party platforms. Enhanced penalties from holders and platforms for defaults effectively regulate seller behavior. Additionally, reputation rewards or losses incentivize sellers to adopt honest practices, with consumer and sellers' reputations influencing the likelihood of comprehensive third-party platform reviews. In summary, policy makers should improve the regulatory mechanism, establish a fair system of rewards and penalties, develop a compensation mechanism for information sharing, deregulate prices and enhancing feedback channels.
Keywords: Drug quality supervision, MAH system, Online sales of drugs, evolutionary game, Simulation analysis
Received: 30 Jun 2024; Accepted: 05 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wen, Chen, Zhou, Bai, Wu, Zhao and Fang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Zongliang Wen, School of Management, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, China
Yun Zhao, School of Management, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, China
Jinhua Fang, School of Management, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, China
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