Strategizing niceness in co-opetition: The case of knowledge exchange in supply chain innovation projects

Eman S. Nasr, Marc D. Kilgour and Hamid Noori

European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 244, issue 3, 845-854

Abstract: In this paper, we take a novel approach to address the dilemma of innovation sharing versus protection among supply chain partners. The paper conducts an exploratory study that introduces factors affecting a firm's optimum supply chain innovation strategy. We go beyond the conventional Prisoners’ Dilemma, with its limiting assumptions of players’ preferences and symmetry, to explore a larger pool of 2 × 2 games that may effectively model the problem. After classifying firm types according to collaboration motive and relative power, we use simulation to explore the effects of firm type, opponent type, and payoff structure on repeated innovation interactions (or, equivalently, long-term relations) and optimality of ‘niceness’. Surprisingly, we find that opponent type is essentially irrelevant in long-term innovation interactions, and focal firm type is only conditionally relevant. The paper contributes further by introducing reciprocation of strategy type (nice versus mean), showing that reciprocation is recommended, while identifying and explaining the exceptions to this conclusion.

Keywords: Decision analysis; Simulation; Innovation; Game theory; Knowledge sharing dilemma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221715001083
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:244:y:2015:i:3:p:845-854

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.02.011

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().