Blockchain Platform Selection for Supply Chain Finance: A Bilateral-Negotiation-Based Group Multiattribute Decision Making Method

Supply chain finance (SCF) can provide innovative financing approaches for cash-constrained supply chain partners, which has been utilized for industries to optimize capital, reduce costs and alleviate financing pressure. Despite there are promising results in SCF, there are still many challenges in the development of SCF practice, such as the information asymmetry problem and credit data transmission barriers. Blockchain has been widely adopted in the finance industry, it can provide solutions to these challenges. However, the capabilities and performance of different blockchain platforms (BPs) vary greatly, thus, it is necessary to select an appropriate BP according to the specific circumstances of SCF. The main purpose of this article is to develop a decision-making framework to select a suitable BP for the blockchain implementation of SCF. Since SCF business involves multiple entities such as core enterprises, suppliers, and financial institutions, each entity has different requirements for BP, so conflicts of opinion are prone to occur in the decision making process. To this end, we develop a bilateral negotiation group multiattribute decision making (BN-GMADM) method with personalized individual semantics (PIS) to coordinate opinions and promote consensus. In addition, the distributed linguistic scoring rule (DLSR) is proposed for BP alternatives scoring and ranking. A case study and several analyses are provided to illustrate and validate the proposed approach.