Blockchain adoption for product freshness traceability under platform competition

With the rapid development of e-commerce, a large number of online platforms specialising in fresh product have entered the market. Previous studies have rarely considered how to efficiently deliver the product’s freshness status to customers. In this paper, we establish a game model that consists of two competitive online platforms, which operate vertically differentiated fresh product on the same market. The product freshness is uncertain due to the opaque delivery process and consumers may have the risk-averse attitude, while platforms could opt to deploy blockchain to trace the product’s logistic information in real time and eliminate the consumer’s risk-averse attitude. Our finding shows that when the platform competition and the consumer’s risk-averse attitude are high, both platforms would like to adopt blockchain technology; With the moderate platform competition and the consumer’s risk-averse attitude, neither platform wants to adopt blockchain technology. Otherwise, only one platform would like to adopt blockchain technology. Moreover, when one platform deploys blockchain, the other one can free ride and become better off. Finally, we analyse consumer surplus and social welfare under different scenarios. A win-win-win situation can be achieved among platforms, consumer surplus, and social welfare when both platforms deploy blockchain technology.