HOW DOES DIGITAL TWIN–BLOCKCHAIN INTEGRATION ENHANCE TRACEABILITY TRUST? A PHYSICAL–DIGITAL–TRUST TRIPLE MAPPING MODEL

Agricultural traceability increasingly combines digital twins with distributed ledgers, yet the two technologies are often treated as if co-deployment were enough to create trust. This paper challenges that assumption. It treats traceability trust as the result of three linked translations: physical events into a digital representation (representational fidelity), that representation into a tamper-evident record (evidential integrity), and the record into evidence that stakeholders can inspect and understand (verification confidence). Using affordance theory, signaling theory and the trust literature, the paper explains why these translations operate sequentially, why a weak translation can produce false assurance, and why consumers, firms and regulators attach different weights to the three qualities. Nine propositions and a focused research agenda follow from the argument. The contribution is a configurational account that connects traceability design to the judgments stakeholders make about provenance.