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The pharma supply chain comprises various parties including distributors, manufacturers, raw material suppliers, regulators, pharmacies, hospitals, and patients. Due to the product's complexity and transaction flows, an efficient traceability system is needed in the pharma supply chain to identify the current and all previous product owners. Digitizing the track and trace process significantly improves regulatory oversight and guarantees product quality. A distributed platform for shared data that is immutable, trustworthy, accountable, and transparent in the pharmaceutical supply chain could be built using blockchain-based drug traceability. This review aims to shed light on blockchain technology's significance and necessity for pharmaceutical supply chain management systems. A comprehensive literature review was performed between January 2017 and September 2023. The search was conducted to elaborate on blockchain technology. Blockchain is a software-based technology that logs and records transactions using a block structure arranged chronologically. Cryptography technology links and secures these blocks on a peer-to-peer network. Blockchain is anticipated to transform the pharmaceutical supply chain by giving all participants access to a single, straightforward system that provides transparency, security, and oversight of the end-to-end delivery of goods. In all, various literature data were included in this review. Using a supply chain powered by blockchain has many benefits. To begin with, it gives a thorough account of the entire procedure from start to finish. A single piece of software can manage the entire supply chain. Additionally, it increases communication between parties with permission. The enhanced security and traceability that blockchain offers is another important benefit. A blockchain system can track, trace, and recall products. Blockchain-based pharmaceutical supply chain management enables the tracking of medicinal drug transactions from raw materials suppliers to end consumers. The pharma blockchain has the potential to enhance the security, integrity, data provenance, and functionality of the supply chain due to its transparency, immutability, and auditability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The device-to-device communication (D2D) concept allows direct communication between nearby devices without a base station. At the same time, cellular resources are reused. It reduces the end-to-end delay of D2D active users significantly. Most of the traditional methods consider allocating resources by downlink or uplink alone. The present study considers a novel hybrid approach for joint downlink and uplink to allocate resources, maximizing the network throughput. Further, it minimally restricts cellular and D2D pairs' interference and ensures smooth D2D communication. The challenge is that power control and Quality of service constraints are seriously degraded by strong intra-cell and inter-cell interference due to spectrum reusability and deployment. A hybrid structure that exploits efficient resource allocation is needed to tackle this situation. The optimization problem is formulated as a mixed-integer non-linear problem that is usually NP-hard. Such a problem is divided into two stages, namely channel assignment and power allocation. The factors considered for the objective problem of resource allocation are the transmission power of the cellular user, D2D active user, base station, connection distance, and Quality of Service constraints. The proposed novel hybrid scheme can improve network throughput and improves spectrum efficiency. The numerical results imply that the hybrid method in the proposal functions efficiently and is verified by comparing it with the present joint resource allocation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the potential and limits of privacy-preserving corporate blockchain applications for information provision. We provide a theoretical model in which heterogeneous firms choose between adopting a blockchain application or relying on traditional third-party intermediaries to inform the capital market. The blockchain's ability to generate information depends on each firm's data profile and all firms' endogenous adoption decisions. We show that blockchain technology can improve the information environment and outperform traditional institutions with firms' adoption decisions serving as a credible value signal and the application uncovering firm values by analyzing all participating firms' data. However, we also characterize an adverse mixed-adoption equilibrium in which neither of the two channels realizes its full potential and information provision declines not only for individual firms, but also in aggregate. The equilibrium is a warning sign that has broad implications for policymakers' regulatory effort and investors' assessment of corporate blockchain applications. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Funding: B. Franke and Q. Gao Fritz gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Project-ID 403041268–TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency. A. Stenzel gratefully acknowledges financial support from the DFG through CRC TR 224 (Project C03) during prior employment at the University of Mannheim. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4718. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]