 Competition for blood donationsAnna Nagurney and Pritha Dutta Omega, 2019, vol. 85, issue C, 103-114 Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the blood services industry in the US, which is undergoing major changes, including a rise in competition, and we develop a novel game theory model for blood donations among blood service organizations in which the organizations seek to maximize their transaction utilities and compete on the quality of service that they provide at the blood collection sites in different regions. The governing equilibrium concept is that of Nash Equilibrium. We formulate the equilibrium as a variational inequality problem and prove the existence of the equilibrium quality level service pattern. We also provide conditions for uniqueness and present a Lagrange analysis and interpretation associated with the lower and upper bounds on the quality service levels. An algorithm with nice features for computations is proposed and then applied to numerical examples of increasing complexity. The results demonstrate that enhanced competition can improve the quality service level and that blood service organizations can also benefit from having collection sites in multiple regions. Keywords: Game theory; Blood supply chains; Competition for donations; Variational inequalities; Healthcare (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jomega:v:85:y:2019:i:c:p:103-114 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.omega.2018.06.001 Access Statistics for this article Omega is currently edited by B. Lev More articles in Omega from Elsevier |
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