Discussion: View Thread

Dear colleagues, 

Please consider joining our PDW if you're attending AOM this year. We welcome attendees from all divisions and look forward to a broad-ranging discussion. No registration necessary. 

Organizer: Brian Gordon, U. of Utah, David Eccles School of Business
Organizer: Diana Maria Hechavarria, U. of South Florida
Organizer: Jason Windawi, Princeton U.
Presenter: Christian Catalini, MIT Sloan School of Management
Presenter: Teppo Felin, U. of Oxford
Presenter: Hanna Halaburda, NYU Stern
Presenter: Wulf Kaal, U. of St. Thomas, Minnesota–School of Law
Presenter: Kyle J. Mayer, U. of Southern California
Presenter: Jason Potts, RMIT U.
Presenter: Beverly Rich, U. of Southern California
Presenter: Kevin Werbach, The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Oliver Beige, agnostic blockchain consulting
Discussant: Robert Joseph Wuebker, U. of Utah
Discussant: Russ McBride, U. of California, Merced


Blockchain is a distributed platform technology that enables the creation and maintenance of trustworthy decentralized ledgers in the absence of trusted intermediaries. Instead of relying on trusted third-parties, blockchains are designed to maintain data integrity through cryptography, openness, and incentive mechanisms, which collectively make opportunism expensive and detectable. The distributed ledger at the heart of blockchain enables disparate economic actors, who might not know or trust one another, to establish consensus regarding the status of economically meaningful data, create and execute algorithmic 'smart contracts', and orchestrate complex resource assemblies in the absence of centralized, hierarchical direction. While easy enough to explain, some have begun to argue that this technology stands to transform economic activity in fundamental ways by affording novel means of governance on par with markets, hierarchies, networks, and relational contracting. If true, blockchain has profound implications for the phenomena entrepreneurship and strategy scholars care about. This PDW seeks to foster a community of scholars interested in studying the entrepreneurial and strategic implications of blockchain by reviewing what is known and framing an agenda for future research.


Best,
Jason