Blockchain incentive design for transparent supply chain: A Review

Supply chain transparency is essential for ensuring product authenticity, regulatory compliance, sustainability, and building consumer trust. Blockchain technology offers a decentralized and tamper-proof solution for achieving end-to-end supply chain visibility. However, its widespread adoption faces significant technical, economic, and behavioral barriers, including high implementation costs, data privacy concerns, and resistance to change. The review examines the critical role of incentive design in overcoming these barriers and motivating stakeholders to adopt blockchain and share truthful data. We synthesize theoretical approaches, particularly game theory and contract theory, that model stakeholder payoffs and guide the creation of effective reward and penalty mechanisms. Empirical case studies, such as IBM Food Trust and VeChain, illustrate practical benefits and real-world challenges, while simulation-based methods like agent-based modeling and sensitivity analysis provide insights into optimizing incentive strategies. Despite advances, gaps remain in dynamic and context-sensitive incentive structures, cross-cultural enforcement, and integrated frameworks combining economic, behavioral, and technological factors. We propose policy and managerial recommendations and outline future research directions to address these gaps.