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.

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你跳我跳？区块链应用平台中的羊群行为

区块链技术给包括运营和供应链管理在内的许多领域带来了机遇和挑战。由于去中心化、透明、不可篡改、匿名等创新特性，区块链应用为用户在运营环境中的决策开辟了新天地。总体而言，缺乏关于区块链技术羊群效应及其对区块链应用平台的潜在影响的证据。针对这一新技术现象，我们在本研究中研究了在区块链应用操作的背景下羊群行为是否以及如何发生。我们提出了两个与区块链应用程序运行相关的新变量（即技术保证和去中心化管理工作）和一个与用户身份相关的新变量（即可识别性）。我们通过利用领先的区块链应用平台上约 10 万笔交易的客观数据，发现了羊群效应存在的证据，该平台提供自助服务和基于抵押的借贷服务。我们的实证研究结果还表明，技术保障和去中心化管理工作可以减少用户的羊群倾向。而且我们发现，可识别性越高，用户的从众倾向越低，受到技术保障和去中心化管理努力的影响也越小。