区块链透明度对生鲜农产品期权合同决策的影响研究

Decentralized finance (DeFi) relies on crypto assets in blockchains to provide financial services. High volatility of crypto assets puts users at risk of financial loss. Options contracts address this issue by empowering a buyer to exchange his asset with that of a seller, which mitigates risks for both parties. Existing options contract protocols have the following two weaknesses: (i) The buyer have to lock his asset during the contract's lifespan, incurring heavy opportunity costs; (ii) Turing-completed smart contract (TCSC)/hash time lock contract (HTLC) is required to exchange assets, which restricts applicability as TCSC/HTLC is supported by a limited number of blockchains. In this paper, we propose UP-BLOC, a universal and practical blockchain-based options contract. We construct UP-BLOC using a buyer-pay-first design, and propose a blockchain-based secret storage mechanism to ensure the security of the assets involved. This allows the buyer to engage in an options contract without locking any asset and resulting opportunity costs, and thus is more practical than existing works. Besides, UP-BLOC achieves the exchange of assets using standard digital signatures instead of TCSC/HTLC. Hence, UP-BLOC is compatible with all blockchains and is universal. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that UP-BLOC is secure and efficient.

Companies that are investing in blockchain technology to enhance supply chain transparency face challenges in fostering collaborations with others and deciding what information to share. Transparency over the actions of supply chain partners can improve operational decisions, but sharing own data on the blockchain can put firms at a competitive disadvantage. In this paper, we investigate the resulting questions of when blockchain should be adopted in a supply chain and how it should be designed by analyzing two ways that it can enhance supply chain transparency: making the manufacturer’s sourcing cost transparent to the buyers (i.e., vertical cost transparency) and making the ordering status of buyers transparent to each other (i.e., horizontal order transparency). Given such transparency, firms can design a smart contract that automates transactions contingent on the revealed information and enables them to realize better equilibrium outcomes. We find that blockchain increases supply chain profit only when the manufacturer’s capacity is large and decreases supply chain profit otherwise. If the capacity is sufficiently large to eliminate the buyers’ competition, blockchain leads to a win–win–win and the incentives of all participants are naturally aligned. If the capacity is only moderately large, the manufacturer needs to compensate the buyers to facilitate a blockchain implementation. However, if the capacity is small, horizontal order transparency enabled by the blockchain mitigates the buyers’ overorder incentive to compete for the manufacturer’s capacity and increases double marginalization. For such cases, we show that a blockchain that only enables vertical cost transparency should (and can) still be adopted in a range of small capacity cases, and we propose an access control layer for the logistics data to implement such a blockchain. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management. Funding: J. Liu was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72101110] and The MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [Grant 20YJC630084]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4851 .

… , increasing level of transactions’ security and transparency, and close focus on various … real options pricing. At the same time, paper presented a new classification of options contracts …

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 .

This study targets a fresh produce supply chain that includes a retailer owning private demand information, a supplier who may adopt blockchain, and a 3PL (Third Party Logistics) engaging in freshness keeping. By developing a multi‐stage game model, we study the blockchain adoption strategy and the information‐sharing strategy considering information transmission between the 3PL and the supplier and analyze the interaction of these strategies. We find that under the case of moderate blockchain cost, the retailer could encourage the supplier to adopt blockchain by sharing information strategically. In that case, the retailer would actively share with the supplier and the 3PL for fresh produce with low freshness sensitivity and serious consumer distrust. Otherwise, due to the dominant impact of information transmission, the retailer has to keep private information if consumers are less concerned about freshness, while it has to share information if consumers are more concerned about freshness.

The application of blockchain can effectively improve the efficiency of fresh agricultural product circulation and consumer trust, but it can also increase investment costs. In this context, this paper introduces parameters such as blockchain unit variable cost, the level of blockchain technology investment, and consumer channel preference in two dual-channel supply chain systems dominated by fresh agricultural product manufacturers: online direct sales and distribution. It compares and analyzes pricing and channel selection strategies in both cases of not using and using blockchain. The research shows that when blockchain is used, manufacturer profits are higher in the direct sales model than in the distribution model. Traditional retailers’ profits are lower in the direct sales model than in the distribution model. Total supply chain profits are higher in the direct sales model than in the distribution model, and they exhibit an inverted "U" shape as the level of blockchain investment increases. In the online direct sales model, if the blockchain technology unit variable cost is within a certain threshold range, manufacturer profits, traditional retailer profits, and total supply chain profits are all higher than when blockchain technology is not used. In the online distribution model, when the blockchain variable cost and blockchain usage level meet certain conditions, manufacturers, traditional retailers, and online distributors all have higher profits when using blockchain technology than when not using it. This study provides theoretical guidance for the practical application of blockchain technology in dual-channel fresh agricultural product supply chains.

… (permissioned) blockchain platforms built on a specific family of open-source distributed ledger … Some blockchain applications give consumers the option to enroll to receive mobile or …

Agri-food supply chains are highly exposed to freshness deterioration, demand uncertainty, and information asymmetry. In practice, upstream suppliers may strategically misreport freshness-related information to influence downstream procurement decisions, which can amplify inefficiency and increase food loss and waste. This study develops an analytical framework that integrates (i) strategic freshness misreporting by an informed supplier, (ii) endogenous investment in blockchain-enabled traceability that improves information credibility at a cost, and (iii) contract design for supply chain coordination. We consider a two-echelon agri-food supply chain with stochastic demand and freshness-dependent valuation, and characterize equilibrium operational decisions under centralized and decentralized settings. The results reveal how misreporting reshapes optimal order quantities, wholesale prices, and profit allocation, and identify conditions under which misreporting increases expected waste and undermines sustainability performance. We then examine how traceability investment changes the incentives of both parties, leading to adoption thresholds and potential incentive misalignment under decentralization. Finally, we design revenue-sharing, cost-sharing, and combined contracts and derive parameter regions that coordinate the blockchain-enabled agri-food supply chain and generate Pareto improvements for both the supplier and the retailer. Numerical experiments illustrate the comparative statics and quantify the trade-offs among profitability, transparency, and waste reduction. Relative to existing blockchain-enabled agri-food supply chain models, the framework jointly endogenizes supplier misreporting of freshness, blockchain-based traceability investment, and contract parameters, thereby uncovering new adoption thresholds and coordination regions that tightly link transparency decisions to food loss and waste. The findings provide actionable guidance for using digital traceability and contract mechanisms to curb opportunism, enhance coordination, and support sustainable agri-food supply chains.

Various perishable agricultural products are recalled due to harmful health risks. Blockchain has been used to reduce the amount of such products wasted and disposed. Specifically, a supply chain with a wholesaler, a retailer, and customers is considered where the retailer decides when to switch from a conventional supply chain information management system (SCIMS) to a blockchain-based SCIMS. This article models the uncertain customers' demand as a geometric Brownian motion process and shows how to obtain the optimal demand threshold above which the switch occurs and the corresponding expected time. Next, the model is extended by incorporating two types of government subsidies (i.e., a fixed subsidy on the switching cost and a variable subsidy per unit demand). Through sensitivity analysis and numerical studies, the impacts of key parameters on the optimal demand threshold and expected time of switching are presented. Finally, managerial insights and policy implications are derived.

Blockchain technology allows fresh agricultural enterprises to share records stored on the chain, and the technology can benefit information management systems, such as decentralization and transparency. This study uses game theory to examine a blockchain introduction strategy for fresh agricultural enterprises in a competitive environment, considering consumer traceability preferences. We establish a pricing decision model in traditional and blockchain traceability modes and identify optimal solutions. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the blockchain introduction strategy, consumer preferences, and blockchain influence factor on optimal pricing decisions. The results indicate that the introduction of blockchain could improve the profits of enterprises under certain conditions. Moreover, consumer traceability preferences and the blockchain influence factor could significantly affect the blockchain introduction strategy. We also discover that when the blockchain influence factor meets a certain range, introducing blockchain technique in the traceability system could shift demand from traditional enterprises to blockchain enterprises. The total market demand for blockchain enterprises under the blockchain traceability mode will increase, whereas that of traditional enterprises under the blockchain traceability mode will decrease. Both consumer traceability preferences and the blockchain influence factor could significantly affect optimal pricing. Finally, some management suggestions are provided for the traceability of fresh agricultural enterprises based on the research conclusions.

Purpose This paper aims to develop a coordination mechanism that can be applied to achieve the channel coordination and information sharing simultaneously in the fresh agri-food supply chain with uncertain demand. It seeks to elucidate how the producer can use an option contract to transfer the risk caused by uncertain demand, impel the retailer to share demand information and improve the performance of supply chain. Design/methodology/approach An option contract model based on the basic model of fresh agri-food supply chain is introduced to compare the production, profit, risk and information sharing condition of the supply chain in different cases. In addition, a case study focusing on the sale of autumn peaches produced by a local producer is investigated, which provides evidence of the applicability of the authors’ approach. Findings The optimal option contract can help the supply chain achieve channel coordination and reach Pareto improvement. In the meantime, such a contract will encourage the retailer to share market demand information with producer spontaneously and help maintain the strategic cooperation between two parties. Research limitations/implications This paper considers a single-producer, single-retailer system and both of them are risk neutral. Practical implications Presented results can be used as suggestions for improving the contract design of fresh agri-food supply chain in China and can also provide references for other countries with similar experiences as China in fresh agri-food production. Originality/value This research introduces the option contract into fresh agri-food supply chain and takes information sharing and the risk caused by uncertain demand into consideration.

In this paper, we study a two-stage fresh agricultural products supply chain consisting of a producer and a retailer. Fresh agricultural products are prone to quality and quantity loss, so the retailer needs to exert freshness-keeping effort to reduce loss. Since the product’s freshness and pricing will affect the market demand, we assume that the pricing of fresh agricultural products follows a two-stage decision, and the price is reduced after the freshness decreases. We compare two-stage decision models under three scenarios: centralized, decentralized, and option contracts to explore the impact of freshness-keeping effort on the supply chain and the coordination effect of option contracts on the supply chain. The results show a critical value of freshness-keeping effort under different decision scenarios. The retailer’s profit is directly proportional to the freshness-keeping effort when it is less than the critical value. When it exceeds the critical value, retailer profit is inversely proportional to the freshness-keeping effort. Introducing option contracts can increase the total order quantity, reduce the selling price, and increase the supply chain profit. When the freshness-keeping effort satisfies specific conditions, the total profit under the option contract is equal to the total profit under the centralized decision, and perfect supply chain coordination can be achieved. Finally, the theoretical reasoning and conclusions of the model are verified by numerical simulation, and the influence of freshness-keeping effort on supply chain decision-making and coordination effect is analyzed.

The price risk of fresh agricultural products has been a significant topic in recent years. Taking the two-level fresh agricultural product supply chain as the research object, this paper studies t...

This paper analyzes the option coordination problem of a fresh agricultural product supply chain under two supply chain structures, when the production cost and the loss rate are disrupted simultaneously. This paper provides the explicit option coordination conditions for the disrupted supply chain under two supply chain structures, and then explores the effects of the disruptions and supply chain structure on the option coordination conditions. The results suggest that it is unfavorable to apply the original coordinating contracts without disruptions to coordinate the disrupted supply chain. The coordination of the disrupted supply chain can be achieved with knowledge of the distribution of demand. In two coordinating contracts for the disrupted supply chain, the exercise price is still at the original level without disruptions while the option price deviates from the original level without disruptions. Moreover, the relationships of the coordination conditions in two supply chain structures depend on the value of the profit allocation coefficient. When the profit allocation coefficient exceeds (falls behind) a certain threshold, the option price is set at a higher (lower) value in the supplier-led supply chain structure than in the distributor-led supply chain structure, while the exercise price is set at a lower (higher) value in the supplier-led supply chain structure than in the distributor-led supply chain structure. Finally, the disrupted supply chain with any supply chain structure will perform better in the modified coordinating contracts than in the original coordinating contracts without disruptions.

… that traceability upgrades can either increase concentration (by eliminating the hedging value of … systems, supply disruption risk, strategic technology adoption, and blockchain-enabled …

… The aim of this paper is to use options as hedging tools to … that uses option contracts for hedging against price and … 75] propose that blockchain technology with traceability, transparency …

The evolving landscape of digital finance presents unprecedented opportunities for transforming agricultural markets, particularly through the empowerment of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs). This conceptual study explores the intersection of digital agri-finance, agri-derivatives, and organic certification markets, focusing on enhancing FPO participation in sustainable trade. While FPOs have emerged as pivotal institutions in aggregating farmer produce and improving bargaining power, their access to formal financial systems and high-value markets, such as derivatives trading and certified organic supply chains, remains limited. The existing literature predominantly addresses digital financial inclusion or sustainable agriculture in isolation, with limited insights into how digital finance can enable FPOs to access structured trading platforms and certification-driven markets. This study fills this gap by proposing a conceptual framework that integrates digital finance tools (e-wallets, agri-fintech platforms, and blockchain-based traceability) with FPO-led participation in price risk management via agri-derivatives and market differentiation through organic certification. The framework emphasizes the enabling role of digital infrastructure, capacity building, and supportive policies in creating inclusive, traceable, and sustainable agricultural value chain. These findings have significant policy implications, advocating an integrated approach that supports digital literacy, regulatory reform, and targeted investment to strengthen FPO access to green and premium markets. This study contributes to ongoing dialogues on sustainable trade and green economy transitions in emerging agricultural systems.

… even if they do not use blockchain traceability services provided by supply chain members. … equilibrium pricing model choice together with the supply chain members' blockchain …

In this paper, we study the decision-making and coordination problem of a two-tier fresh food supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer. Considering the influencing factors of consumers’ information preference, freshness, and misrepresentation, we construct a centralized decision-making model and a decentralized decision-making Stackelberg game model. We also analyze the changes in the equilibrium solution of the supply chain before and after the input of blockchain technology, identify the conditions for the investment in blockchain technology, and design a “cost-sharing + benefit-sharing” combination contract for the coordination of the blockchain. The results are as follows: Firstly, under decentralized decision-making, if the fresh supplier misreports the freshness of the product, it will mislead the retailer to increase the order quantity, and its own profit will rise. Therefore, the fresh supplier has the motivation to misreport freshness. However, the backlog of fresh products will eventually damage the retailer‘s profit, and the overall profit of the supply chain will also be damaged. Therefore, the increase in the profit of the fresh supplier is at the expense of the overall interests and stability of the supply chain. Second, when the investment cost of blockchain technology is within a certain threshold, it is feasible to invest in blockchain technology. Consumers’ preference for traceable fresh products will encourage the fresh supply chain to improve the level of information traceability and increase investment in blockchain technology. Finally, there are double marginal effects in the fresh supply chain under decentralized decision-making. The combined contract of “cost-sharing + revenue-sharing” can coordinate the overall revenue of the supply chain to the level of centralized decision-making. When the contract parameters meet certain conditions, Pareto improvement in revenue can be achieved for all parties involved in the fresh supply chain. The willingness of retailers to invest in blockchain technology will change with the change in contract parameters. When the proportion of retailers’ costs and the proportion of shared income are higher, the level of retailers’ investment in blockchain technology will decrease. Therefore, the interests of supply chain members need to be balanced in the process of contract coordination.

This paper investigates the blockchain technology (BT) adoption strategy in a three‐echelon dual fresh produce supply chain (FPSC). By developing a Stackelberg game, we explore the operational decisions under four BT adoption strategies, that is, the NN strategy (no BT), the BP strategy (the platform adopts BT), the BR strategy (the retailer adopts BT) and the BS strategy (the supplier adopts BT). The key findings reveal that BT adoption is crucial for FPSCs, effectively mitigating the quality deterioration and output losses inherent in perishable goods. The coupling effect between the benefits and costs directly affects the optimal decisions and profits. When the ratio of BT's benefits to costs is greater than a threshold, adopting BT is advantageous. Finally, we identify the best BT strategy for FPSC systems. For the supplier and the wholesaler, the BS strategy is best, but for the retailer, the BP strategy is better. We provide some management significance at the end of the paper.

In the traditional fresh supply chain, farmers commonly conceal the true quality information of their products in order to achieve better sales. This article focuses on the use of blockchain technology to address the issue of false freshness reporting in a two-level fresh supply chain consisting of a rural cooperative and a supermarket. Taking into account the dual losses of quality and quantity in the process of agricultural products transportation, the impacts of the product freshness and the blockchain investment level on random market demand are quantified in this paper. And game models for centralized and decentralized decision-making before and after investing in blockchain technology are proposed. By comparing the supply chain optimal decisions and performances under different scenarios, a revenue-cost sharing contract is designed to coordinate the decentralized decision-making. Simulation results show that the application of the blockchain technology can further consolidate the superiority of the centralized decision-making. However, there is a certain threshold for the application of the blockchain technology in decentralized decision-making. When the unit cost of blockchain exceeds the threshold, the rural cooperative will abandon its cooperation with the supermarket due to reduced profits. And the combined contract also has a threshold boundary for its coordinating effect on decentralized decision-making.