Should live streaming be adopted for agricultural supply chain considering platform’s quality improvement and blockchain support?

Platforms empower farmers to address the quality and safety issues of agricultural products by offering blockchain technology and improving product quality. Recently, live streaming becomes a new sales channel to sell products, and plays a key role in enhancing the visibility of agricultural products and introducing detailed information of agricultural products in real time. This disrupted the long-term cooperative relationship between the platforms and farmers. Based on this, our paper explores that whether and how the agricultural supply chain members should adopt the live streaming channel. We build a game model that consists of a farmer, a platform, and an influencer, and investigate the live streaming introduction strategies in the agricultural supply chain in the context of the platform assisting the farmer (the improvement of quality level and adoption of blockchain). We capture two characteristics of the live streaming channel, i.e., the live streaming channel’s impact on market size (live streaming value) and additional profit per unit product derived from the influencer’s personal influence (influencer value). We interestingly find that when the live streaming value is low, introducing live streaming negatively impacts the farmer’s profit at the low influencer value in the farmer’s live streaming. When the live streaming value is low (high), introducing live streaming damages the platform’s profit at the moderate (low) influencer value in the platform’s live streaming. Therefore, adopting the live streaming channel is not necessarily profitable for agricultural supply chain members. We also extend our model to check the robustness of our findings. This study is the first to explore live streaming introduction strategies in the agricultural supply chain in the context of the platform assisting the farmer, and significantly contributes to the literature and provides valuable guidance for farmers and platforms on when to adopt the live streaming channel in the agricultural supply chain.