Enabling Emergency Production Shifting : The Value of Blockchain in Supply Chain Resilience Confronting COVID-19

Nowadays, factories located in COVID-19 infected regions (e.g., Vietnam) are facing random outbreaks. If blockchain is adopted, then the outbreaks can be known immediately and emergency production shifting can be enabled, although high crash cost will be incurred. Otherwise, production delay will be inevitable. We therefore formulate the tradeoffs among the high crash cost, the benefit from quick production, and the efficiency loss because of supply chain decentralization in a global brand’s blockchain adoption decisions. We show that, in the presence of supply chain competition, the global brand will be benefited from blockchain adoption when the competition intensity degree is high, the crash cost is low, and the probability of COVID-19 outbreak is high. We then examine the social welfare and find that it can also be benefited from the global brand’s blockchain adoption but the consumer surplus cannot