مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد پلتفرم های مبتنی بر بلاک چین – الزویر 2019

Blockchain technology has been receiving much public attention recently, promising to disintermediate transactions through decentralized governance and distributed data-infrastructures. However, the majority of the previous studies have focused on the technical aspects, and overlooked blockchain investigation from a managerial perspective. In this paper, based on platform-ecosystem, transaction cost economics, and open-source literature, we contrast and compare blockchain-based platforms and centralized platforms; in other words, decentralized versus centralized governance modes. We base our conceptual analysis on three dimensions—transaction cost, cost of technology, and community involvement—, exploring the conditions under which blockchain-based platforms are more advantageous than centralized platforms. We first compare gains from lower opportunism and uncertainty costs thanks to protocols and smart contracts in blockchain technology versus the costs of higher coordination and complexity of (re)writing those contracts. Second, we compare the gains from immutability and transparency in blockchain-based platforms versus the technological costs of verification and storage of a distributed ledger. Finally, we compare intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of the communities around centralized and blockchain-based platforms in the short and medium term.

Introduction

Despite the hype around blockchain technology, the main attempts to understand such technology have been mainly restricted to the technical aspects of the blockchain protocols and foundations, or the finance of crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin (Risius and Spohrer, 2017). Nonetheless, implications of the blockchain technology reach far beyond the financial system (e.g., De Filippi, 2017; Li et al., 2018). Consensus protocols, smart contracts, cryptography, and distributed ledgers allow for secure, immutable, transparent, and often cheaper transactions, which can be applied to a variety of contexts (Halaburda, 2018; Tschorsch and Scheuermann, 2016). As a consequence, various digital platforms and start-ups have started adopting blockchain technology for micropayments, storage system, intellectual property, financial and physical assets, supply chain and logistics, social networks, media and open science amongst others applications (Davidson et al., 2018; Li et al., 2018). A broader understanding of blockchain and its peculiar attributes, from organizational and managerial perspective, is less explored (Constantinides et al., 2018; Risius and Spohrer, 2017). Filling this void, we build on platform governance, transaction cost economics, and open source communities literatures to investigate the costs and benefits of adopting blockchain technology as a decentralized platform infrastructure, exploring the boundary conditions and the trade-offs involved in the adoption of such technology.