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

In interorganizational information sharing, opportunism has two sides: information poaching by the information recipient and information manipulation by the information provider. The threat of such opportunism can entirely preclude business relationships. Prior countermeasures either failed to reliably prevent opportunistic behavior or addressed only one of the two sides. To overcome these shortcomings, we develop three design principles of an information system that facilitates reliable interorganizational information sharing without revealing the underlying data. We instantiate the design in a blockchain system for wear-based leasing contracts for machine tools. We demonstrate and evaluate the efficacy and utility of our design through in-depth interviews with business and technology experts and a survey of 85 machine tool users and 77 lessors in the manufacturing industry. Our study conceptualizes information poaching and information manipulation as two sides of the same problem and shows empirically that opportunities for beneficial business relationships arise when both are addressed together. Our design principles provide a blueprint for a shared information system that prevents both information poaching and information manipulation, thereby enabling new interorganizational information sharing relationships based on data that would otherwise be considered too sensitive to share or too untrustworthy to rely on.