Opportunistic behaviour in supply chain finance: a social media perspective on the ‘Noah event’

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon a social media perspective, this study explores the phenomenon of opportunistic behaviour in supply chain finance (SCF). Based on research into the factors that drive opportunistic behaviour in the context of SCF and the associated effects, this study conceptualises and empirically examines a research model by leveraging social media data related to the ‘Noah event’. The data was collected from Sina Weibo, the biggest Chinese microblog platform. A text mining approach utilising Python programming and R technique was employed for data analysis. The results reveal interesting findings. Opportunistic behaviour had negative effects on all the SCF participants involved in the study. Information uncertainty was the factor that induced opportunistic behaviour, whereas information governance played a moderating role that could mitigate information uncertainty and, thus, opportunistic behaviour. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research endeavour investigating opportunistic behaviour in SCF. The insights provided by the study are of significance for both academia and practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• Opportunistic behaviour
• supply chain finance
• information uncertainty
• information governance
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71573292,71702208,71774182].