A key strategic decision for platforms such as Amazon, JD.com, and eBay is the extent to which they provide information to consumers because product information plays an important role in consumers’ purchasing decisions. Considering that consumers may doubt the disclosed information, these platforms may have the incentive to implement blockchain technology to authenticate their disclosed information and, therefore, eliminate consumer distrust. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to investigate the optimal information disclosure and equilibrium blockchain adoption strategy for competing platforms and analyze how the consumers’ beliefs and blockchain cost will affect the equilibrium results. Our results show that the equilibrium blockchain adoption strategy is a threshold-structured policy. To be specific, there are two critical values of blockchain cost. If the blockchain cost is larger than the upper threshold, then neither of the platforms has the incentive to apply blockchain technology, and the market is full of unverified information; however, if the blockchain cost is less than the lower threshold, both platforms prefer to apply blockchain technology, and the amount of authenticated information is larger than that of unverified information in the nonblockchain case. Finally, if the blockchain cost is between the two bounds, then a mixed strategy becomes the equilibrium; that is, one platform adopts the blockchain technology, while the other does not. In this case, the amount of authenticated information may be larger than that of unverified information, but the platform that ignores using blockchains is also better off with this new technology. We make several extensions, and the results show that our main conclusions remain unchanged, which indicates that the conclusions can be generalized.

亚马逊、京东和易趣等平台的一个关键战略决策是它们向消费者提供信息的程度，因为产品信息在消费者的购买决策中起着重要作用。考虑到消费者可能会怀疑所披露的信息，这些平台可能有动力实施区块链技术来验证他们所披露的信息，从而消除消费者的不信任。在本文中，我们开发了一个分析模型来研究竞争平台的最佳信息披露和均衡区块链采用策略，并分析消费者的信念和区块链成本将如何影响均衡结果。我们的结果表明，均衡区块链采用策略是一种阈值结构的策略。再具体一点，区块链成本有两个临界值。如果区块链成本大于上限，那么两个平台都没有应用区块链技术的动力，市场上充斥着未经验证的信息；但是，如果区块链成本低于下限，那么两个平台都更愿意应用区块链技术，并且在非区块链情况下，经过验证的信息量大于未经验证的信息量。最后，如果区块链成本在两个界限之间，则混合策略成为均衡；即一个平台采用区块链技术，另一个平台不采用。在这种情况下，经过认证的信息量可能会大于未经验证的信息量，但忽略使用区块链的平台也因这项新技术而变得更好。我们进行了几次扩展，结果表明我们的主要结论保持不变，这表明结论可以推广。