Digital Supply Chain Integration for Enabling Sustainable Product Authenticity: Experimental Insights on the Roles of Transparency and Platform Type

Abstract

Digital supply chain (SC) integration plays a critical role in managing SC collaboration and curbing deceptive business practices. Despite growing research efforts to address how digital platforms facilitate SC information sharing and enhance coordination, their role in ensuring sustainable product authenticity remains underdeveloped. This study examines how different platforms (blockchain vs. non-blockchain) and transparency levels (high vs. low) influence the association between digital SC integration and SC collaboration, leading to product authenticity. We conceptualize digital SC integration using three key dimensions: information, operational, and relational integration, and examine their distinct impacts. We conduct an experiment that manipulates the transparency level and platform type and collect data from 346 SC professionals. The findings suggest that digital information and digital relational integration are significant for SC collaboration, which in turn enables sustainable product authenticity. While we find that digital operational integration alone does not affect SC collaboration, its impact becomes significantly positive only when the transparency level is high. However, in the case of a blockchain platform, the moderating impact of transparency on the association between digital operational integration and SC collaboration is weakened. These findings assist us in obtaining a more granular understanding of how digital SC integration is instrumental in promoting SC collaboration and enhancing sustainable product authenticity. We discuss several theoretical and managerial implications based on these findings.