| dc.description.abstract | In today′s globalized era, a significant issue faced by businesses is how to establish product differentiation to enhance their competitive advantage. In 2008, a emerging decentralized ledger technology called ＂blockchain＂ emerged, bringing significant disruption to existing market mechanisms. The emergence of blockchain has impacted numerous industries. In the supply chain industry, blockchain technology enables trusted records of the entire production and logistics process, with features such as transparency, traceability, and immutability. Many companies have adopted blockchain to address trust issues in their products. However, implementing blockchain also incurs costs for businesses, making it a crucial challenge to weigh the strategy of adopting blockchain or not.
Game theory, an important branch of economics, studies the strategic decisions and equilibria made by individuals in interactive settings. Therefore, this study aims to use game theory models to analyze the strategic decision-making of two competing companies in a product differentiation scenario, both in terms of horizontal differentiation and vertical differentiation, regarding whether or not to adopt blockchain applications. The paper will also analyze how a supplier, within a supply chain composed of one supplier and two companies, can customize its wholesale pricing to maximize profit.
From this study, it is found that in cases of horizontal or vertical product differentiation, the analysis results for the two companies are similar. As the costs of blockchain implementation increase, the strategies of the two companies will exhibit four strategic equilibria that are independent of each other. The level of consumer uncertainty significantly affects the willingness of companies to adopt blockchain. The supplier′s profit-maximizing strategy also exhibits four strategic equilibria, with different strategy outcomes depending on the degree of product differentiation. The supplier′s optimal profit pricing can be analyzed using the supplier′s profit curve. | en_US |