To Cooperate or Not : Blockchain Adoption in a Platform Supply Chain With Upstream Competition and Environmental Sustainability

The proliferation of copycats poses a severe threat to brand manufacturers in the e-commerce era. Product innovation is a key strategy for brand manufacturers to enhance their market competitiveness and effectively combat copycats, which also may be beneficial or harmful to the environment. Yet, due to a lack of reliable quality information delivery mechanisms, it is challenging for brands to gain consumer trust in product innovation quality. Blockchain traceability technology can boost the transparency of the supply chain and thus consumer trust, which has been deployed by many brand manufacturers. Nonetheless, product innovation and blockchain adoption both costs much. In addition, the high energy consumption of blockchain implementation and the environmental influence of quality innovation are often overlooked in current literature. From both the financial and environmental perspectives, this study proposes a platform supply chain including a manufacturer, copycat, and online platform and explores three scenarios, i.e., without blockchain, the manufacturer deploys blockchain independently, the online platform and the manufacturer deploy blockchain cooperatively. Our results show that the manufacturer is more likely to adopt blockchain when the consumer distrust level is high or the quality innovation is not very beneficial to the environment. Furthermore, we find that blockchain implementation could not only achieve a win-win-win outcome among the manufacturer, copycat, and online platform but also benefit the environment. Moreover, we find that the manufacturer may not always be eager to cooperate with the online platform to implement blockchain technology and when cooperation is required, the manufacturer may be less likely to deploy blockchain and lack the motivation to innovate