Special Issue in Journal of Business Research.
A Blockchain-Based Approach to Marketing in the Sharing Economy
Guest Editors: T. Ming Tan, J. Salo, T.G. Brashear Alejandro, G. Tan Wei Han, K.B. Ooi, & Y.K. Dwivedi
Deadline: 15 August 2022
The research on the blockchain is essential across all business school disciplines as this technology is expected to transform business processes (Tan et al., 2021), operations (Filimonau & Naumova, 2020), and marketing (Kumar, 2018), and subsequently result in a radical change in organizations (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2017). Importantly, blockchain technology offers a new model of economic coordination and governance in the sharing economy, as well as to the metaverse (Tan & Salo, 2021).
Although prior research investigated blockchain applications, such as their benefits/values, challenges, and potential (Hughes et al., 2019), most business school scholars examine how blockchain is related to finance (Ali et al., 2020), supply chain (Hew et al., 2020; Tsolakis et al., 2021), and human resource domains (Christ & Helliar, 2021). Limited attention has been given to providing on how marketing research should be systematically and theoretically examined that underlines the three key foundations of marketing (i.e., institutions, processes, and value creation; Tan & Salo, 2021). Indeed, numerous prominent scholars (e.g., Cui et al., 2020; de Villiers et al., 2021; Eckhardt et al., 2019; Gligor et al., 2021; Kumar, 2018) have listed blockchain as one of the most influential factors that affect marketing in the sharing economy.
Our goal is to enrich and extend prior research on blockchain by examining state-of-the-art marketing theories and implications for the sharing economy. We welcome conceptual, methodological, qualitative, or quantitative contributions grounded in a range of perspectives that offer insights or answers to this goal. Papers considered for the Special Issue may focus on topics including, but not limited to, the following research questions:
– Since consumers/prosumers will have a higher level of institutional roles when they become influential developers, how does a consumer or prosumer identity alter when the person is engaged in different stages of blockchain identity self-congruence?
– What kind of institutional roles are played by the consumers/prosumers in the blockchain-based sharing economy, and how could these institutional roles potentially be misused or abused?
– How the blockchain-based sharing economy is changing how we attach to brands, how we consume them, and how we build loyal, versus negative, relationships with brands?
– As transparency is increased, most likely privacy and data management issues, are brought to the front; how does consumer/prosumer react to the lost privacy or possible data management challenges that might occur in the blockchain-based sharing economy?
– Since blockchain allows consumers/prosumers to control their right of ownership of online properties (i.e., creating self-sovereign identity) in the sharing economy, what kind of additional values will be co-created among consumers/prosumers and what are the tradeoffs (e.g., sharing privacy while monetizing personal data) during the process?
– How sustainable consumption is seen from the value-creation point of view when information is more transparent and the available heuristics for consumer decision-making increase in quantity and quality in the blockchain-based sharing economy?
– How does information about the origin of components (e.g., the raw materials of vegan food) badly influence the business and consumer choices in the blockchain-based sharing economy, as well the firm’s effort on green marketing?
– What is the role of the firm or firms in innovating when the blockchain-based sharing economy increases the number of collaborative options with other firms, the network of firms, consumers, and prosumers alike?
– If and when a blockchain-based sharing economy creates options for marketing managers to increase origin and verification possibilities, are marketing managers jumping in or hesitating in their decisions? Why do they behave as they do?
– How to handle the transition from a traditional sharing economy to a blockchain-based sharing economy while creating omnichannel customer experiences?
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