Social credit: a comprehensive literature review

To avoid credit fraud, social credit within an economic system has become an increasingly important criterion for the evaluation of economic agent activity and guaranteeing the development of a market economy with minimal supervision costs. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the social credit literature from the perspectives of theoretical foundation, scoring methods, and regulatory mechanisms. The study considers the credit of various economic agents within the social credit system such as countries (or governments), corporations, and individuals and their credit variations in online markets (i.e., network credit). A historical review of the theoretical (or model) development of economic agents is presented together with significant works and future research directions. Some interesting conclusions are summarized from the literature review. (1) Credit theory studies can be categorized into traditional and emerging schools both focusing on the economic explanation of social credit in conjunction with creation and evolution mechanisms. (2) The most popular credit scoring methods include expert systems, econometric models, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, and their hybrid forms. Evaluation indexes should vary across different target agents. (3) The most pressing task for regulatory mechanisms that supervise social credit to avoid credit fraud is the establishment of shared credit databases with consistent data standards.