How Regulatory Governance Enhances the Effectiveness of Data-Driven Credit Enhancement in Supply Chain Financing for Small and Micro Logistics Enterprises: An Evolutionary Game Analysis

Logistics platforms (LPs) increasingly use multidimensional data to provide supply chain financing (SCF) to small and micro logistics enterprises (SMLEs). However, platform-centered data control can weaken financial institutions’ (FIs’) trust in platform data, thereby reducing the effectiveness of data-driven credit enhancement. To address this issue, this study integrates the social–ecological systems framework with evolutionary game theory and develops a tripartite evolutionary game involving FIs, LPs, and SMLEs. By comparing scenarios with and without regulatory governance, the study examines how regulatory governance affects the strategic evolution of data-driven credit enhancement in SCF for SMLEs. The results show that regulatory governance improves system performance through cost reduction, trust enhancement, and incentive alignment, thereby relaxing the conditions required for the system to evolve toward the Pareto-optimal state of credit granting, strict supervision, and non-default. The strategic choices of the three actors are mainly influenced by data acquisition costs, incentive intensity, and penalties. Numerical simulations further show that government incentives must exceed certain thresholds to promote cooperation, while penalty mechanisms play a critical role in constraining opportunistic behavior and accelerating convergence to the desirable equilibrium. These findings provide theoretical support and practical insights for improving data-driven credit enhancement in SCF for SMLEs.