Blockchain-Enabled Knowledge Management Systems for Transparent and Trustworthy Retail Marketing

Rapid advances over the last decade in blockchain, knowledge management, and distributed ledgers promise to bring equitable access to more reliable and more verifiable information, to support accountability for decision makers and consumers. In this study, the effect of different knowledge management dimensions such as the traceability index, trust architecture, and governance protocols and transaction time as well as the resistance to manipulation is analyzed and compared to digital tokens and finally benchmarked frameworks for their use as transparent indicators on retail platforms. In this study, propensity score matching analysis is carried out with two different datasets using regression modelling with four categorical inputs (blockchain adoption, firm size, consumer trust, and governance) and three outputs (retail efficiency, marketing transparency and accountability) to compare structural and functional levels of knowledge management in different retail contexts. Integration with blockchain did not change the efficiency (β = 0.142; p = 0.238), transparency (β = 0.067; p = 0.411) or trust (β = 0.092; p = 0.327) of the framework for fraud detection. It was found that traceability/immutability (β = 0.281) of blockchain systems required no additional validation following implementation, while smart contracts/consensus (β = 0.314) and governance/rule-setting (β = 0.227) required a threshold and adjustment, respectively. The results also concluded that there is a gap in integrating data interoperability between firms, and there is a need for collecting transactional, behavioral and performance metrics, regulatory, operational, and consumer data, to better evaluate and refine the reliability of each system from a systemic perspective. This analysis demonstrated that blockchain-enabled knowledge management can be safely introduced into a retail environment as an enabler to improve trust, and reduces the need for traditional intermediaries.

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