You jump, I jump? Herding behavior in blockchain application platforms

Blockchain technology has brought opportunities and challenges to many fields, including operations and supply chain management. Due to the innovative characteristics of decentralization, transparency, immutability, and anonymity, blockchain applications break new ground for users' decision-making in an operations environment. There is a lack of evidence regarding herding in blockchain technology in general and its potential effect on blockchain application platforms in particular. In response to this new technological phenomenon, we studied whether and how herding behaviors take place in the context of blockchain applications for operations in this research. We propose two new variables related to the operation of the blockchain application (i.e., technical assurance and decentralized management efforts) and a new variable related to user identity (i.e., identifiability). We found evidence of the existence of herding by utilizing the objective data of approximately 0.1 million transactions on a leading blockchain application platform providing self-service and collateral-based lending services. Our empirical findings also reveal that technical assurance and decentralized management efforts reduce users' herding tendencies. Moreover, we found that the higher the identifiability, the lower the users' herding tendency, and the less they are affected by technical assurance and decentralized management efforts.