And No One Gets the Short End of the Stick: A Blockchain-Based Approach to Solving the Two-Sided Opportunism Problem in Interorganizational Information Sharing

The threat of opportunistic behavior is an enduring problem in interorganizational information sharing based on sensitive data. The two sides of opportunism in interorganizational information sharing— information poaching by the information recipient and information manipulation by the information provider—may preclude beneficial information sharing relationships altogether. Previously proposed organizational and technical countermeasures against the threat of opportunism either fail to reliably prevent information poaching and manipulation or prevent only one of them at a time. To address these shortcomings, we develop three design principles for an information system that facilitates reliable information sharing based on sensitive data in interorganizational business transactions without revealing the actual data. We instantiate our design principles in a multicompany research consortium for wear-based leasing contracts for machine tools. Through in-depth interview sessions with business and technology experts, we demonstrate the efficacy of our artifact in addressing the two-sided opportunism problem. A survey-based evaluation of the artifact’s utility in the context of machine tool leasing shows that organizations are willing to engage in more interorganizational information sharing, rely more on shared information, and draw on more sensitive data when provided with our solution. The study makes three key contributions. First, it contributes to the literature on interorganizational information sharing by identifying information poaching and information manipulation as two sides of the same problem and by showing empirically that opportunities for beneficial business arise if both forms of opportunism are addressed simultaneously. Second, our design principles constitute a blueprint of a shared information system that enables reliable (i.e., verifiably truthful) information sharing between business partners without revealing the data underlying the shared information. Third, the study contributes to the literature on blockchain systems by recombining specific blockchain technology components, namely, private data collections, smart contracts, and joint governance, in a useful, novel way.