Internet of Products: Toward a Product Identity Layer of the Digital Economy. A Conceptual Research Paper

The internet has evolved through successive waves that each conferred persistent, verifiable, network-accessible identity on a new class of entities: the Internet of Information gave identity to content through DNS, and the Internet of Value gave identity to financial assets through blockchain. A third domain remains comparatively under-digitised: the physical economy of manufactured goods. Once products leave the factory, their individual identities dissolve into fragmented, organisation-specific records, sustaining an estimated USD 464 billion in annual counterfeit trade (OECD, 2021) and inhibiting circular-economy transitions. This paper develops Product Identity Theory, explaining the institutional conditions under which manufactured products become persistent, recognisable, and actionable economic entities, and proposes the Internet of Products (IoP) as the digital infrastructure layer that instantiates this theory at scale. Drawing on transaction cost theory, information asymmetry theory, and digital infrastructure theory, the paper makes three contributions: (1) it positions IoP as a digital infrastructure layer categorically distinct from prior phases because physical products, unlike information or financial assets, can be damaged, moved, or substituted independently of their digital representation, creating the oracle problem as a constitutive design challenge; (2) it introduces the 4E Model (Encode, Enrich, Exchange, Execute) as a staged framework with explicit boundary conditions and failure modes; and (3) it integrates six previously fragmented research streams under a unified infrastructure-theoretic lens that produces cross-stream predictions. Six propositions refined into testable hypotheses and three illustrative cases ground a structured empirical research agenda. Keywords: Internet of Products, Product Identity Layer, Digital Infrastructure, 4E Model, Supply Chain Transparency, Tokenization, Real-World Assets, Transaction Cost Theory, Information Asymmetry, Digital Economy, Digital Twin Toward a Product Identity Layer, Product Identity Theory Version: 8 (Revised for journal submission) Target journal: Electronic Markets (SSCI Q1)