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

This theory-building conceptual paper proposes the Internet of Products (IoP) as the third major stage of internet infrastructure evolution — following the Internet of Information and the Internet of Value. It introduces a new Product Identity Layer in which every physical product is assigned a persistent, verifiable, and network-accessible digital identity, enabling it to function as an active economic entity across its entire lifecycle. Drawing on transaction cost theory, information asymmetry theory, and digital infrastructure theory, the paper develops the 4E Model of Product Digitisation (Encode → Enrich → Exchange → Execute) with explicit boundary conditions and failure-mode analysis. Six research propositions are formulated, five of which are refined into testable hypotheses with operationalised constructs and identified data sources. The framework is grounded through three illustrative cases (EU Falsified Medicines Directive, Parmigiano Reggiano RFID authentication, and Homie Product-as-a-Service) and critically examines key challenges including the oracle problem, governance failures (TradeLens), and privacy-transparency tensions. Theoretical contributions are threefold: (1) positioning IoP as a categorically distinct infrastructure layer due to the physical-digital linkage (oracle) challenge; (2) the 4E Model as a staged framework with boundary conditions and failure modes; (3) generating cross-stream predictions by integrating previously fragmented literatures (IoT, supply chain, DPP, digital twins, and tokenisation) under a unified infrastructure-theoretic lens. The paper concludes with a structured research agenda for empirical validation. This version is targeted at Electronic Markets (Springer) and represents a substantially revised and improved manuscript. Keywords: Internet of Products, Product Identity Layer, Digital Infrastructure, 4E Model, Digital Product Passport, Real-World Assets, Tokenization, Transaction Cost Theory, Information Asymmetry, Oracle Problem Version: 4 (Revised for journal submission) Target journal: Electronic Markets (SSCI Q1)