A Co-Opetitive Automated Negotiation Model for Vertical Allied Enterprises Teams and Stakeholders

• Published in: Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 20; no. 4; p. 286
• Main Authors: Gao, Taiguang, Wang, Qing, Huang, Min, Wang, Xingwei, Zhang, Yu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 14.04.2018; MDPI
• Subjects: automated negotiation; Automation; co-opetition; Collaboration; Decisions; Game theory; non-cooperative game; Shapley value; Stakeholders; supply chain; Supply chains; Teams; vertical allied enterprises team; automated negotiation; vertical allied enterprises team; Shapley value; supply chain; non-cooperative game; co-opetition
• ISSN: 1099-4300; 1099-4300
• DOI: 10.3390/e20040286

Upstream and downstream of supply chain enterprises often form a tactic vertical alliance to enhance their operational efficiency and maintain their competitive edges in the market. Hence, it is critical for an alliance to collaborate over their internal resources and resolve the profit conflicts among members, so that the functionality required by stakeholders can be fulfilled. As an effective solution, automated negotiation for the vertical allied enterprises team and stakeholder will sufficiently make use of emerging team advantages and significantly reduce the profit conflicts in teams with grouping decisions rather than unilateral decisions by some leader. In this paper, an automated negotiation model is designed to describe both the collaborative game process among the team members and the competitive negotiation process between the allied team and the stakeholder. Considering the co-competitiveness of the vertical allied team, the designed model helps the team members making decision for their own sake, and the team counter-offers for the ongoing negotiation are generated with non-cooperative game process, where the profit derived from negotiation result is distributed with Shapley value method according to contribution or importance contributed by each team member. Finally, a case study is given to testify the effectiveness of the designed model.