Blockchain-Driven Freshness-Keeping Efforts in Community Group-Buying Platforms
研究了区块链如何影响社区团购供应链中的保鲜努力，发现平台定价时区块链会导致搭便车效应，但赋予定价权后供应商努力回升；区块链仅在追溯成本低且激励系数适中时被采用。
The loss of freshness-keeping efforts in fresh product supply chains not only diminishes consumers' purchasing experiences but also leads to significant economic losses. This challenge is particularly pronounced in community group-buying (CGB) supply chains. This study investigates how blockchain adoption can influence CGB supply chains, which involve a platform that sources products from the supplier and delegates order fulfillment to the group leader. By leveraging blockchain-enabled real-time traceability, a platform can precisely attribute freshness-keeping efforts to the respective parties, thereby facilitating an incentive mechanism tailored to the effort level. The analysis yields three key findings. First, counterintuitively, blockchain adoption under platform-determined pricing induces a free-riding effect: freshness-keeping efforts are intensified by the group leader and reduced by the supplier. However, the supplier's efforts rebound when pricing power is granted with a higher incentive coefficient. The acquisition of pricing power facilitates blockchain adoption in enhancing supplier's freshness-keeping efforts, yet proves more challenging in improving group leader's freshness-keeping efforts. Second, the platform adopts blockchain only when the traceability cost is sufficiently low and the incentive coefficient remains moderate. Third, lower traceability costs result in a win–win–win (platform-supplier-group leader) outcome, expanding with consumer sensitivity to freshness-keeping efforts. The robustness of these findings is verified through extensive numerical simulations and sensitivity analyses. Furthermore, the optimal incentive coefficient decreases monotonically with the commission rate and exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with consumer freshness-keeping effort sensitivity. Our study contributes to existing theoretical frameworks regarding the value of blockchain in fresh product supply chains and provides novel managerial insights for CGB platforms.