Blockchain Papers

Yannis Bakos, Hanna Hałaburda

No abstract is available for this record.

Yoko Shibuya, Volodymyr Babich

No abstract is available for this record.

Yuan Huang, Queping Kong, Nan Jia, Xiangping Chen · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Layth C. Alwan, Ye Shi, Srinivasan Raghunathan, Xiaohang Yue

No abstract is available for this record.

Mikuláš Černý, Marián Gogola, Stanislav Kubaľák, Ján Ondruš

Processes associated with the transformation of inputs (raw materials, components) into outputs (goods, finished products) and their transport to the place of consumption are an essential part of the functioning of today’s society. These processes are becoming more complex with the gradual globalization. As the complexity of the supply chain increases, so does the risk of disruption. There are problems such as a lack of information on the origin of the products, a lack of real-time information and, with that, a problem with tracking shipments. With a large number of documents, the risk of fraud and forgery also increases. Due to the large number of stakeholders in logistics chains, the level of transparency is being lost. One possible solution to eliminate the risk of supply chain complexity is to integrate blockchain technology into the supply chain. Thanks to properties such as distribution, immutability, transparency, blockchain can have great potential to solve the problems of the traditional supply chain. The aim of this paper is to describe the basic problems of the traditional supply chain, which can disrupt its course. In the next part, we will introduce the basics of blockchain technology and describe what processes of the traditional supply chain could be replaced by this technology.

Samya Dhaiouir

No abstract is available for this record.

Jingjing Jiang, Aobo Lyu

This study aims to solve the credit problems in the supply chain commodity and currency circulation links from the perspective of the ledger, while the game model method has been adopted. The research firstly reviews the relationship between distributed ledger technology and the essential functions of currency. Then, by constructing two-agent single-period and multi-period game models in the entire supply chain, the researchers analysed the incentive mechanism and equilibrium solution of distributed nodes of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The results of this study include the incentive mechanism and optimization of distributed nodes based on licensed distributed ledger technology, which is an important issue that CBDC faces when performing currency functions. The implications of this study mainly cover the limitations of the underlying technology of the public chain and its reward mechanism in the supply chain management and provide support for the rationality of the CBDC issuance mechanism based on state-owned commercial banks, which provides a reference for the CBDC practice. The main value of the research not only serves the decision-making department of the CBDC issuance but also provides ideas on the operation mode of digital currency for the field of digital currency research.

Mohammad Amin Yazdani, Daniel Roy, Sophie Hennequin

No abstract is available for this record.

Alon Benhaim, Brett Hemenway, Gerry Tsoukalas

In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a committee of elected block producers. In theory, the smaller the committee, the faster the blockchain can reach consensus and the more it can scale. What's less clear, is whether this mechanism ensures that honest committees can be consistently elected, given voters typically have limited information. Using EOS' Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol as a backdrop, we show that identifying the optimal voting strategy is complex and practically out of reach. We empirically characterize some simpler (suboptimal) voting strategies that token holders resort to in practice and show that these nonetheless converge to optimality, exponentially quickly. This yields efficiency gains over other PoS protocols that rely on randomized block producer selection. Our results suggest that (elected) committee-based consensus, as implemented in DPoS, can be robust and efficient, despite its complexity.

Lorenz Trautmann, Rainer Lasch

No abstract is available for this record.

Marco Lambrecht, Andis Sofianos, Yilong Xu

We investigate how key features associated with the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism of Bitcoin (commonly referred to as mining) affect pricing. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we observe that price bubble formation can be attributed to mining. Moreover, overpricing is more pronounced if the mining capacity is centralized to a small group of individuals. The order book data reveal that miners seem to play a crucial role in bubble formation. Further probing the mechanism in a second study, we find that both mining costs and decisions jointly with the sluggish rate of supply of the asset contribute to the bubble formation. Our results demonstrate that erratic pricing is an inherent feature of cryptocurrencies based on a mining protocol, thus seriously limiting any prospects for such assets becoming a medium of exchange. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: The funding provided by the University of Heidelberg, Hanken Foundation [Grant 271-6250], and Durham University is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01238 .

Jacob Lohmer, Lucas Petzok, Rainer Lasch

No abstract is available for this record.

Senyu Xu, Huajun Tang, Zhijun Lin

This study introduces a dual‐channel supply chain including a supplier and a retailer with capital constraints, in which the retailer can apply for the trade credit financing from the supplier. This work investigates the effects of two typical behaviors, free riding behavior and consumer switching behavior, on inventory, ordering, and sales effort decisions in decentralized and centralized decision situations with stochastic demand. In order to achieve the optimal performance in the centralized system, this research designs a partial buyback contract to coordinate the supply chain. Furthermore, numerical analysis is provided to test the feasibility of the model. The results indicate that in the dual‐channel supply chain with the above two behaviors, (1) the optimal sales effort level, optimal order quantity, the optimal offline, and online profits under the centralized decision‐making are more than those under decentralized scenario, except for the optimal inventory level; (2) the increase of the offline consumer switching rate will lead to the reduction of the offline order quantity and the offline expected profit and raise the online inventory level and the online expected profit; (3) the increase of the online consumer switching rate will raise the offline order quantity and the offline expected profit but has no significant impact on the online inventory level and the online expected profit; (4) the increase of the free riding coefficient of the supplier, no matter whether in decentralized or centralized systems, will reduce the offline sales effort level, the offline expected profit, and the online expected profit and raise the inventory level. Finally, this work provides some managerial implication.

Huilin Chen, Zheyi Chen, Feiting Lin, Peifen Zhuang

In agri-food supply chains (ASCs), consumers pay for agri-food products produced by farmers. During this process, consumers emphasize the importance of agri-food safety while farmers expect to increase their profits. Due to the complexity and dynamics of ASCs, the effective traceability and management for agri-food products face huge challenges. However, most of the existing solutions cannot well meet the requirements of traceability and management in ASCs. To address these challenges, we first design a blockchain-based ASC framework to provide product traceability, which guarantees decentralized security for the agri-food tracing data in ASCs. Next, a Deep Reinforcement learning based Supply Chain Management (DR-SCM) method is proposed to make effective decisions on the production and storage of agri-food products for profit optimization. The extensive simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed blockchain-based framework and the DR-SCM method under different ASC environments. The results show that reliable product traceability is well guaranteed by using the proposed blockchain-based ASC framework. Moreover, the DR-SCM can achieve higher product profits than heuristic and Q-learning methods.

TianLin Zhang, Jinjiang Li, Xinbo Jiang

With the emergence and development of blockchain technology, due to its innovation in the underlying technology, many potential innovations have been created in the financial aspects of different industries, and even disruptive changes have occurred. Especially mature applications in supply chain finance are more extensive, and at the same time, the technology also effectively promotes the development of finance-related technology. We proposed a blockchain-based framework and used an accessory technology, namely smart contracts. The credit mechanism can be reformed to promote the flow of credit value and make it highly coupled with financial scenarios to obtain the feasibility of supply chain process design.

Lingxiu Dong, Yunzhe Qiu, Fasheng Xu

Problem definition: For many supply chains, deep-tier suppliers, due to their small size and lack of access to capital, are most vulnerable to disruptions. We study the use of advance payment (AP) as a financing instrument in a multitier supply chain to mitigate the supply disruption risk in a traditional system (with limited visibility) and a blockchain-enabled system (with perfect visibility). The main goal of this paper is to shed light on how blockchain adoption impacts agents’ operational and financial decisions as well as profit levels in a multitier supply chain. Academic/practical relevance: Traditionally, because of the limited visibility in the deep tiers, powerful downstream manufacturers’ financing schemes offered to their immediate upstream suppliers are not effective in instilling capital into the deep tiers. Advancements in blockchain technology improve the supply chain visibility and enable the manufacturer to better devise deep-tier financing to improve supply chain resilience. Methodology: We develop a three-tier supply chain model and take a game-theoretic approach to compare how blockchain-enabled deep-tier financing schemes affect a financially constrained supply chain’s optimal risk-mitigation and financial strategies. Results: We find that although improved visibility via blockchain adoption can help the manufacturer make informed supply chain financing decisions, whether it can benefit all supply chain members depends on the financing schemes in use. Blockchain-enabled delegate financing increases risk-mitigation investments and benefits all three tiers of the supply chain only when the tier 2 supplier is severely capital-constrained with the working capital below a threshold. Because delegate financing endows the intermediary tier 1 supplier with leverage over the manufacturer, the inefficiency inhibits an all-win outcome when the tier 2 supplier is not severely capital-constrained. Blockchain-enabled cross-tier direct financing exhibits a compelling performance as it always leads to win-win-win outcomes (and is thus ubiquitously implementable) regardless of the suppliers’ working capital profile. Managerial implications: Our insights help firms assess opportunities and challenges associated with enhancing supply chain visibility via blockchain adoption.

N. Bora Keskin, Chenghuai Li, Jing-Sheng Jeannette Song

Motivated by blockchain applications in the fresh produce industry, we consider a newsvendor problem in which a retailer faces stochastic and freshness-dependent consumer demand. The retailer can adopt blockchain technology to have more transparent information on the freshness of supply. We quantify the value of blockchain-enabled freshness transparency by deriving closed-form expressions for the retailer’s expected profit growth and food waste reduction brought by blockchain adoption. Using publicly available data, we provide a numerical example illustrating that for Walmart’s strawberry business in the United States (which is about only 4% of Walmart’s fresh produce sales), blockchain can increase annual profit by [Formula: see text] million while eliminating 23 million pounds of food waste annually through operational improvements. Despite this substantial value for the retailer, blockchain adoption can decrease the expected profit of the retailer’s supplier. We design a family of threshold-type smart contracts contingent on a blockchain-based freshness consensus and examine when such contracts offer a win-win proposition to the retailer and the supplier. Moreover, when the retailer offers freshness-based price discounts, we find that less fresh supply leads to less food waste. In contrast, when the supplier adjusts the wholesale price based on freshness, less fresh supply causes more food waste. We also generalize our findings to the cases of (i) dual sourcing, (ii) noisy measurements in the Internet of Things sensors feeding data into blockchain, and (iii) the retailer’s culling processes. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02949 .

Ilhaam A. Omar, Raja Jayaraman, Mazin Debe, Khaled Salah · 6 authors

Effectively managing the healthcare supply chain (HCSC) process is crucial for healthcare providers not only during pandemics such as COVID-19 but also in their normal operations. Despite significant advances in new technologies and treatment options providers still suffer from poor procurement, ordering, forecasting, and distribution practices. Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) are an important stakeholder in HCSC and benefit providers with cost savings, volume discounts, and vendor selection. However, the current GPO contract process is time-consuming and lacks efficiency. Hence, our proposed solution integrates blockchain technology and decentralized storage to promote transparency, streamlines communication with stakeholders, and minimize the procurement timeline while avoiding pricing discrepancies and inaccuracies. Our solution connects all the stakeholders such as manufacturer, GPO, distributor, and provider using Ethereum network. In this paper, we propose a blockchain solution using smart contracts to automate the GPO contract process. We propose a generic framework for contracting process in the HCSC with detailed algorithms depicting various interactions among HCSC stakeholders. The smart contract code was developed and tested using Remix IDE and the code is publicly shared via Github. We discuss various security risks and present detailed cost analysis of various transactions incurred by the stakeholders. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed blockchain-based solution is economically feasible as only a minimal transaction fee is expended by the stakeholders in the distributed network.

Ahmad Musamih, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Junaid Arshad · 7 authors

Healthcare supply chains are complex structures spanning across multiple organizational and geographical boundaries, providing critical backbone to services vital for everyday life. The inherent complexity of such systems can introduce impurities including inaccurate information, lack of transparency and limited data provenance. Counterfeit drugs is one consequence of such limitations within existing supply chains which not only has serious adverse impact on human health but also causes severe economic loss to the healthcare industry. Consequently, existing studies have emphasized the need for a robust, end-to-end track and trace system for pharmaceutical supply chains. Therein, an end-to-end product tracking system across the pharmaceutical supply chain is paramount to ensuring product safety and eliminating counterfeits. Most existing track and trace systems are centralized leading to data privacy, transparency and authenticity issues in healthcare supply chains. In this article, we present an Ethereum blockchain-based approach leveraging smart contracts and decentralized off-chain storage for efficient product traceability in the healthcare supply chain. The smart contract guarantees data provenance, eliminates the need for intermediaries and provides a secure, immutable history of transactions to all stakeholders. We present the system architecture and detailed algorithms that govern the working principles of our proposed solution. We perform testing and validation, and present cost and security analysis of the system to evaluate its effectiveness to enhance traceability within pharmaceutical supply chains.

Mohammed T. Nuseir

Purpose This paper investigates the impact of blockchain technology on the Bricks and Mortar (B&M) grocery sector from a technological and functional perspective. Design/methodology/approach The research adopted an exploratory research design and the data comprises 17 semi-structured interviews with personnel at the top grocery retail chains in the United States, for example, Wal-Mart, Tesco, Stop and Shop and Meijer. Additionally, two major US-based blockchain service providers are included – SumatoSoft and Accubits. Findings Blockchain technology affects the business processes of B&M grocery retail by offering payment via tokens, secure payments and contracts between stakeholders, an end-to-end solution in the supply chain and secure management of the stock. However, this process is hampered by a number of challenges such as integrity and security concerns, difficulty in adapting sound logistics, lack of adequate skills and resistance to change by store managers and employees. This can be addressed by imparting education/training and creating awareness about the benefits of blockchain and generating industry-wide collaboration in which regulations can work. Practical implications The research has benefits for B&M grocery stores, governments and the wider society. For example, the findings of this study will help B&M grocery retailers to confront the competition by online retailers such as Amazon, AliExpress or eBay and promote the development of a systematic collaboration to achieve the changes they need. Originality/value The study is original and innovative in that no research to date has focused on how blockchain can help the B&M grocery sector and address its challenges.

Fredrik Högberg, Mohammed Othman, C. Grose

Supply chains and logistics play an essential role in society and must continuously adapt to market changes, customer needs and technological developments, including emerging technologies such as blockchain (BC) and smart contracts. This study reviews current literature in the supply chain and logistics field to investigate emerging trends in BC developments. The results reveal several trends, such as process and flow development, the streamlining of cross-border transactions and the use of smart sensors in logistics. This paper highlights drivers of BC developments, including costs, security, data traceability, trust and transparency. As well as revealing knowledge gaps in research and practice, this study contributes to an increased understanding of the trends in BC developments within the area of supply chains and logistics.

Ajay Kumar, Kumar Abhishek

No abstract is available for this record.

Anchal Patil, Vipulesh Shardeo, Ashish Dwivedi, Jitender Madaan

Purpose Block chain technology (BCT) has emerged as a promising solution for the co-ordination and aid mechanism issues in the context of humanitarian supply chain (HSC). However, implementation of BCT in HSC discerns several barriers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify and model the block chain implementation barriers in the context of HSC. Design/methodology/approach In the present study, 14 potential barriers to BCT adoption in HSC have been identified through literature survey. The survey comprises white papers, pilot studies, conference proceedings and journal articles. Further, the identified barriers were finalised in consultation with a team of experts. The team comprised experienced stakeholders working in the humanitarian domain and BCT development. The barriers were categorised into four (technological, organisational, exogenous and economic) perspectives adopting the kappa statistics. Further, the barriers were prioritised using fuzzy best worst method (FBWM) approach. Later, sensitivity analysis was performed to check the robustness and viability of the model. Findings The findings from the study indicate that the barriers, such as “data privacy, ownership, and security issues” (B1), “funding issues and cost complexity” (B3) and “technological complexities” (B8), are relatively more influential. The HSC stakeholders and BCT developers are required to identify the safety mechanism against the misuse of victim’s data. The funding issues and technological complexities are interrelated and need synergetic cooperation between blockchain developers, donors, humanitarian organisations (HOs) and other HSC stakeholders. Further, “lack of awareness and understanding among stakeholders” (B6) and “interoperability, collaboration and cross-pollination among HOs” (B5) were identified as least influential barriers to BCT adoption in HSC. Research limitations/implications In literature, limited study has been observed on determining barriers to BCT implementation. A more systematic method and statistical confirmation is necessary to establish further new confronting barriers. This study is limited to Indian context. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is first of its kind to use an FBWM approach for prioritising the barriers to BCT adoption in the context of HSC. The study provides potential barriers to BCT and categorises them into four different perspectives, along with their degree of influence.

Pietro De Giovanni

No abstract is available for this record.