Distributed Ledgers and Operations: What Operations Management Researchers Should Know about Blockchain Technology

Volodymyr Babich and Gilles Hilary

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology. While it has grown in prominence, its full potential and possible downsides are not fully understood yet, especially with respect to Operations Management (OM). This article fills this gap. After briefly reviewing the technical foundations, we explore multiple business and policy aspects. We identify five key strengths, the corresponding five main weaknesses, and three research themes of applying Blockchain technology to OM. The key strengths are (1) visibility, (2) aggregation, (3) validation, (4) automation, and (5) resiliency. The corresponding weaknesses are (1) lack of privacy, (2) lack of standardization, (3) garbage in, garbage out, (4) black box effect, and (5) inefficiency. The three research themes are (1) information, (2) automation, and (3) tokenization. We illustrate these research themes with multiple promising research problems, ranging from classical inventory management, to new areas of ethical OM, and to questions of Industrial Organization.

Keywords: Visibility; Information aggregation; Validation; Resiliency; Smart contracts; Digital Assets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02005158
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, In press

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-02005158/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02005158

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().