Competition-and-Cooperation Game Between Supplychains And Its Empirical Research

Faced with the double pressure of the economic globalization and customers'personalized and rationalized needs, modern enterprises are seeking partners successively to establish supply union, so as to realize complementalities of resources through external use of resources, and to strengthen their own core competitive abilities continually through risk-and-revenue sharing mechanisms. In the recent years, research on supplychain based on game has been a concern to many scholars and has been adopted extensively. Breaking through the limits of traditional competitive and cooperative games, this dissertation analyzes the game relationships between supplychain node enterprises in term of competition-and-cooperation, tries to reveal competitive and cooperative states of supplychain node enterprises in different situations, and explores a long term system of supplychain system's stabilization as well as effective cooperative ways of supplychain members under competitive conditions.This study is not restricted to the single supplychain, but extends its angle into interchain and supply network. Based on information economics, management, game theory, competition-and-cooperation theory, utility theory, supplychain management theory, the value chain theory and system theory, the dissertation unfolds the discussion in terms of quantity and quality, in the establishing of game model, solution analysis and numerical examples, in combination with empirical research.Firstly, this dissertation describes the import of supplychain: one is the competiton-and-cooperation game relationship between single chain vertical node enterprises; the second one is the competion-and-cooperation game relationship between horizontal chains; and the third one is the competion-and-cooperation relationship between multi-chain networks. The general model of game structure is established of interchain competition-and-cooperation, based on which the game analysis is made on cooperation-and-promotion mechanism between supplychain node enterprises as well as incentive and profit-sharing mechanism. What the analysis shows are: under the condition of complete information, the supplychain enterprises can, through cooperation methanism (called penalty function in the text), promote supplychain operation from the general Nash equilibrium state to the best state meeting the Pareto and keep Nash equilibrium. Under the condition of incomplete information, the enterprises on supplychain can, in accordance with their partners'implicit effort as well as market risks, establish differing motivation and gain-sharing mechanisms with them, to enhance the stability and healthiness of supplychain. It is proposed that, when the market risk is smaller, core enterprises can quit cooperation benefit, that is, give up some noncore business in the cooperative form of outsourcing, to concentrate on their own core business and in turn to enhance core competitiveness.For the horizontal competition-and-cooperation relationship of supplychain, the dissertation, drawing on game theory and system theory, discusses two-level concept model of cooperation and competition together with its competition-and-cooperation game mechanism, and establishes the corresponding competition-and-cooperation game model and solution. Comparing the results of three kinds of equilibriums, i.e. Nash equilibrium, cooperation equilibrium and co-operation equilibrium through supplychain competition-and-cooperation instances, the dissertation points out that strategy profile to which Cooperation equilibrium corresponds exerts the biggest effect on supplychain.Under the condition of incomplete information, provided that supplychain enterprises share chain-internal information, but do not share interchain information, it is very important for two supplychains to make accurate judgment on the market types they are located in. It is indicated by modeling and empirical analysis that, when one supplychain judges the market-style expectation of another supplychain definitely, sale level and equilibrium benefit of the other will increase with the decline of the opposing market-type expectation. However, when the other's expectation is judged wrongly, more market chances will fall on its rivals. Consequently, it will be more difficult to share interchain information. The analysis is made on competition-and-cooperation game relationship of supplychain against the background of the supplychain with double chain and three layers. Through establishing models and solution, a number of meaningful conclusions are drawn --- on the condition of effectifive logistics channels, each member's benefit on the supplychain is positive. In the system of supplychain, the cooperation and competition relationship of single chain members in the network becomes more complicated, and overlapping competition-and-cooperation will occur between upstream and downstream enterprises. For the retailers in the same region and the same market, their scale merit is evident. Conditions being equal, when the retailers with smaller scale compete with retailers with larger scale, the former are likely to have no goods to sell and no benefit to obtain. For the upperstream members, because of limited production capacity, the one with higher price can still reach some quantity of sale to obtain cettain interests if the market demands. However, when the market atrophies, the upstream enterprises with high price will exit supplychain cooperation.Finally, China's laptop industry is taken as an instance, and what is chosen is two-supply-chain network represented by core assembly enterprises. Each supplychain contains the three node enterprises of LCD panel suppliers, the whole machine manufacturers and retailers. The competition-and-cooperation game analysis is discussed with regard to two cases. One is the conditional cooperation between node enterprises; the other is the unconditional cooperation between node enterprises. The results show that, in the conditional cooperation, there is always a supplychain, a winner, and all the supplychain node enterprises will make benefit. But in the supplychain system, this result is not necessarily optimal for Pareto. Nevertheless, in unconditional cooperation, there not only exists Nash equilibrium, but the Pareto is optimal. This result, however, cannot ensure that the profit for each cooperative enterprise inside the chain is above zero. After the sensitivity analysis of production capacity limit, it is known that the limit of suppliers'production capacity will not influence sale quantity and profits at the end of supplychain. The influence is limited to the two levels of suppliers and manufacturers. When the manufacturers are restricted in terms of production capacity, the enterprises on the different levels will be influenced in respect of product quantity and profits. It is of high practical significance to do research into interchain competition-and-cooperation game analysis and empirical study. Specifically, it is somewhat valuable to the study and development of supplychain management theory based on competition-and-cooperation game, and for reference it is of great value to the high efficient operation and coordination of supplychain enterprises.