Open Information Enterprise Transactions: Business Intelligence and Wash and Spoof Transactions in Blockchain and Social Commerce

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/isaf.1438
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Author: Daniel E. O'Leary
• Date: 01 July 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Open Information Enterprise Transactions: Business

Intelligence and Wash and Spoof Transactions in Blockchain

and Social Commerce

Daniel E. O'Leary

University of Southern California, Los Angeles,

CA, USA

Correspondence

Daniel E. O'Leary, University of Southern

California, Marshall School of Business, 3660

Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089‐

0441.

Email: oleary@usc.edu

Summary

This paper investigates what are referred to as ‘open information transactions’. Such trans-

actions are in contrast to traditional transactions, where typically two parties to a transac-

tion are the only ones with information about the transaction. For example, in a sale, the

seller and the purchaser typically are the only ones with information about the transaction.

However, some emerging technologies, such as blockchain accounting, supply chain social

media, and hashtag commerce are making information about the transactions potentially

openly available to others. This paper investigates some of the implications and strategies

that include the use of that open information. For example, open information in accounting

and supply chain transactions provides the potential for both business intelligence analysis

of the information and possibly misleading and illusory transactions, analogous to those

that have garnered the recent attention of the Justice Department in cryptocurrencies.

Finally, this paper suggests that blockchain transaction processing will provide reliable

information in those settings where there is a “single truth”feed of information flow for

the phenomena of interest, no ability to do off‐blockchain transactions (or a large penalty

cost) and limitation to a single identity for each enterprise on the blockchain.

KEYWORDS

asymmetries of information, bitcoin, blockchain, blockchainelectronic markets, dynamic pricing,

fraud, hashtag commerce, information visibility, misleading trades, off‐blockchain transactions,

open information transactions, social commerce, spoof trades, wash trades

1|INTRODUCTION

Typically, information about enterprise transactions is limited tothe direct

parties of each specific transaction. For example, information about the

purchase price, quantity, and so on, in an exchange is usually limited to

the party purchasing and the party selling the goods. The transaction infor-

mationwouldbecapturedinthetwoenterpriseaccountingsystemsor

their supply chain tracking system (s) or both. However, recently, there

have been at least three emerging technology trends that have the ability

to potentially remove those transaction information asymmetries and pro-

vide ‘open information transactions’from non‐publicenterpri ses.

First, blockchainsystems have beenanalyzed for capturing account-

ing and supply chain transactions (e.g. Coyne& McMickle, 2017; Dai&

Vasarhelyi, 2017; Kim & Laskowski, 2018; O'Leary, 2017). Using a

blockchain approach, transaction accounting and supply chain informa-

tion could be kept in public ledgers or consortium‐based quasi‐public

ledgerswith all or some transactioninformationvisible to blockchainpar-

ticipants. Second, so‐called ‘hashtag’commerce has proposed using

social media to send and capture orders using hashtags (e.g. O'Leary,

2016a).Hashtags, for example,embedded in aTwitter tweet, can be used

to initiate and confirm a transaction. Information about those transac-

tions would be broadly available to Twitter users or through search

engines. Third,reportedly, supply chainshave been exchanging transac-

tion information using social media—for example, regarding logistics

(e.g. O'Leary, 2011a)—resulting in information about the supply chain

transactions being available to Twitter users. Each of these three

DOI: 10.1002/isaf.1438

148 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Intell Sys Acc Fin Mgmt. 2018;25:148–158.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/isaf