The impacts of blockchain adoption on an e-agricultural supply chain with risk-averse members

Purpose Blockchain technology (BT) plays an important role in enhancing operational efficiency and consumer trust within the agricultural supply chain (ASC). The purpose of this paper is to investigate how risk-averse attitudes of e-ASC members affect the adoption decision of BT under the consideration of demand uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach This paper simultaneously considers the improvement of consumer trust and concerns of privacy information leakage within the context of BT. We constructed a game model of BT adoption under different risk attitudes consisting of agricultural supplier, third-party logistic (3PL) and e-retailer and introduced the mean-variance theory to analyze the impact of risk attitudes on equilibrium pricing, profits and consumer surplus. We further considered an extended analysis of risk-averse consumers. Findings The equilibrium pricing and equilibrium profit of supply chain members will increase with the heightened consumer trust degree for blockchain products and decrease as the consumer privacy concerns intensify regardless of risk attitudes. In the shift from risk-neutral to risk-averse, supply chain members have an incentive to reduce retail and wholesale prices to maintain their market size, which helps to mitigate the risk of profit volatility associated with demand uncertainty. Suppliers tend to reduce the profit risk from demand uncertainty at the cost of lower expected profits. It is interesting to note that considering risks is beneficial for e-retailer, as it may increase their expected profits. Consumers will also benefit from the risk aversion of supply chain members. Practical implications Practitioners can flexibly adjust pricing strategies based on their own risk preferences and market demand uncertainty to achieve maximum profit and minimum risk. To reduce consumers' privacy concerns, security measures such as digital encryption and digital summarization can be integrated at the technical level to ensure the confidentiality of privacy information. Originality/value This study enriches the research on the application of BT in ASCs and provides insights for practitioners on how to develop effective strategies under different risk attitudes.