Product positioning of low-carbon products based on blockchain-enabled product communities

When introducing a new product, firms must decide how to differentiate it from competitors through product positioning. In the low-carbon industry, positioning affective features of the products effectively gives firm a competitive edge. By applying blockchain to online product communities (OPCs), firms can gain insights into consumers' affective requirements during product positioning. In this study, we develop a game-theoretic framework to explore how to optimize affective design of low-carbon products with blockchain application. We find that firms' affective product design depends on two conflicting forces. On one hand, blockchain adoption in OPCs enhances estimation precision, motivating firms to provide mass products that meet mainstream marketplace requirements. On the other hand, blockchain implementation improves estimation similarity, inducing firms to target niche markets. The network effect exacerbates these two conflicting forces, and the trade-off between them determines firms' product design decisions. Additionally, we examine the impacts of blockchain adoption on firms' profits, environmental performance, consumer surplus, and social welfare. We discover that blockchain application in OPCs is always socially beneficial. However, blockchain adoption's effect on economic and environmental performance, as well as consumer surplus, is contingent on the significance of the conflicting forces. We further conduct a survey and in-depth interviews to validate these findings.