Usha Mohan
IIT Madras, Management Studies, Faculty Member
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Coopetition is defined as the existence of simultaneous competition and cooperation between the same set of players, leading to entanglement of payoffs and actions of the players. This paper provides insights into the game theoretical... more
Coopetition is defined as the existence of simultaneous competition and cooperation between the same set of players, leading to entanglement of payoffs and actions of the players. This paper provides insights into the game theoretical application of quantum games to model simultaneity and entanglement that occur in coopetition. Modeling as a quantum game also allows for a larger action space and hence new equilibrium that may not have existed earlier. The impact of the level of entanglement on the equilibrium of the game can also be studied. We demonstrate the same through an example of two players who currently compete in the domestic market and are considering cooperating simultaneously in the international market. They need to determine the equilibrium strategy to adopt under coopetition that maximizes their payoffs. We also arrive at how to ensure that the quantum strategy is the equilibrium strategy for both players, namely, how to design the quantum strategy and how to define ...
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Purpose Increasing environmental uncertainty, more demanding customers, rapid technological growth and rising capital costs have all forced firms to evolve from collaborating with buyers and suppliers to collaborating with their... more
Purpose Increasing environmental uncertainty, more demanding customers, rapid technological growth and rising capital costs have all forced firms to evolve from collaborating with buyers and suppliers to collaborating with their competitors and that is called coopetition. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the antecedents and outcomes associated with coopetition. Design/methodology/approach Building from the existing literature and three theoretical foundations, resource-based theory, resource dependence theory and game theory, the authors develop a model showing the antecedents and outcomes of coopetition and associated propositions of coopetition. Using a semi-structured interview process of 21 industry executives, the authors offer empirical support for the proposed coopetition model and propositions. Findings Firms are increasingly dependent on the knowledge and expertise in external organizations to innovate, solve problems and improve supply chain performance. T...
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Arthanari (On the traveling salesman problem, presented at the XI Symposium on Mathematical Programming held at Bonn, West Germany, 1982) proposed a Multistage-insertion (MI)-formulation of the symmetric traveling salesman problem (STSP).... more
Arthanari (On the traveling salesman problem, presented at the XI Symposium on Mathematical Programming held at Bonn, West Germany, 1982) proposed a Multistage-insertion (MI)-formulation of the symmetric traveling salesman problem (STSP). This formulation has a polynomial number of constraints. Carr (Polynomial separation procedures and facet determination for inequalities of the traveling salesman polytope, Ph.D. Thesis, Carneige Mellon University, 1995; Separating
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As most of the supply chains in practice are decentralized, a key issue in supply chain management is to study the coordination of supply chain. The interactions among players are typically of two types, viz. vertical competition and... more
As most of the supply chains in practice are decentralized, a key issue in supply chain management is to study the coordination of supply chain. The interactions among players are typically of two types, viz. vertical competition and horizontal competition. We use a game theoretic framework to analyze a two-stage supply chain. The supply chain is modeled as a Stackelberg game with a manufacturer as leader and multiple retailers as followers. We consider multiple retailers competing on quantities (Cournot competition) and study its impact on manufacturer's equilibrium decisions and profits. We show that the wholesale price contract does not achieve Nash equilibrium when retailers offer uniform pricing. On the other hand, in case of perfect price discrimination we prove the existence of unique Nash equilibrium in both deterministic and stochastic demand set-up. Under stochastic demand set-up, we consider information asymmetry between the manufacturer and retailers with respect to ...
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We examine the recent supply chain phenomenon of outsourcing front-end business processes in this paper. Few, if any, of the existing theories provide satisfactory explanation for the rapid growth in this area. We use a model proposed by... more
We examine the recent supply chain phenomenon of outsourcing front-end business processes in this paper. Few, if any, of the existing theories provide satisfactory explanation for the rapid growth in this area. We use a model proposed by Sridhar and Balachandran [Sridhar, S.S., Balachandran, B.V. 1997. Incomplete information, task assignment, and managerial control systems. Manage. Sci. 43(6), 764–778] to determine the factors that might contribute to this phenomenon. Our analysis reveals that the ability of the vendor to forecast the task environment without bias and to gain sophistication in interpreting contract terms might make the firm indifferent between outsourcing and retaining front-end processes in-house. We validate our findings against the work of Apte and Mason [Apte, U.M., Mason, R.O., 1995. Global disaggregation of information-intensive services. Manage. Sci. 41(7), 1250–1262], who develop a theoretical framework to identify criteria for companies to select services to be outsourced. They base their decisions predominantly on the nature of “customer contact.” The combined theories are shown to provide a rich framework for identifying customer-facing tasks that can be outsourced.
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This paper focuses on the importance of decoupling recurrent supply risk and disruption risk when planning appropriate mitigation strategies. We show that bundling the two uncertainties leads a manager to underutilize a reliable source... more
This paper focuses on the importance of decoupling recurrent supply risk and disruption risk when planning appropriate mitigation strategies. We show that bundling the two uncertainties leads a manager to underutilize a reliable source while over utilizing a cheaper but less reliable supplier. As in Dada et al. (working paper, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, 2003), we show that increasing quantity from a cheaper but less reliable source is an effective risk mitigation strategy if most of the supply risk growth comes from an increase in recurrent uncertainty. In contrast, we show that a firm should order more from a reliable source and less from a cheaper but less reliable source if most of the supply risk growth comes from an increase in disruption probability. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007