Blockchain-Enabled Information Quality and Sustainable Food Purchase Decision-Making: The Mediating Role of Perceived Credibility and the Moderating Role of Consumer Trust

Information asymmetry in the unobservable sustainability attributes of food products, together with widespread consumer scepticism toward unverifiable green claims, continues to constrain the translation of pro-environmental attitudes into actual purchases. Blockchain technology has been positioned as a structural response to this asymmetry because its tamper-evident and independently verifiable records lower the cost of substantiating credence claims. However, the bulk of the consumer-facing evidence has examined blockchain as an object of adoption rather than as a conduit of information whose quality determines its persuasive force. Drawing on Signalling Theory within a Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, this study advances and tests a model in which blockchain-enabled information quality (stimulus) influences sustainable purchase decision-making (response) through perceived credibility (organism), with consumer trust serving as a boundary condition on the stimulus-to-organism path. A cross-sectional survey of 412 agri-food consumers was analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling to test direct, mediated, moderated, and conditional indirect effects. The contributions are threefold: blockchain is re-specified as an information signal whose quality, rather than the technology itself, drives downstream sustainability behaviour; perceived credibility is empirically isolated as the psychological mechanism that carries that effect; and message-level credibility is analytically separated from dispositional trust, addressing a recurring conflation in the digital transparency literature.