Blockchain adoption under integrated and differentiated pricing strategies in the farm-adopted mode

In the farm-adopted mode, adopters can adopt their own crops or livestock before the harvest season and will receive their adopted agricultural products during the harvest season. We consider a farmer who sells its products to two types of adopters, namely frequent adopters and infrequent adopters. The infrequent adopters can increase their product valuation since the farmer provides the reselling service for them. Different from traditional products, the farmer can earn a unit extra revenue (UER) brought by the extra on-farm business. For these two types of adopters, the farmer can implement an integrated pricing strategy or a differentiated pricing strategy. Besides, the farmer can choose to adopt blockchain because blockchain can enhance the traceability of agricultural products, fostering greater trust among adopters. We obtain the following findings: First, without blockchain, UER can benefit the farmer in terms of market share and profit under the two pricing strategies. However, with blockchain, the result reverses. Second, under the integrated pricing and differentiated strategies, the farmer should adopt blockchain under low UER. Besides, we also find that integrated pricing is better than differentiated pricing under low UER, which is different from previous findings. Finally, we extend our work to assess our findings’ robustness.