Search results

The author develops a bilateral Nash bargaining model under value uncertainty and private/asymmetric information, combining ideas from axiomatic and strategic bargaining theory. The solution to the model leads organically to a two-tier stochastic frontier (2TSF) setup with intra-error dependence. The author presents two different statistical specifications to estimate the model, one that accounts for regressor endogeneity using copulas, the other able to identify separately the bargaining power from the private information effects at the individual level. An empirical application using a matched employer–employee data set (MEEDS) from Zambia and a second using another one from Ghana showcase the applied potential of the approach.

Emotions, understood as evolving mental states, are pivotal in shaping individuals“' decision-making, especially in ambiguous information evaluation, probability estimation of events, and causality analysis. Public–private partnership (PPP) projects represent a confluence of “economic–environmental–social” dimensions, wherein stakeholder behavior follows the sequential progression of “cognition–emotion–action.” Consequently, comprehending the effects of emotional shifts on stakeholder's decision-making processes is vital to fostering the sustainability of PPP projects.

The paper utilizes rank-dependent expected utility and evolutionary game theory to systematically examine the influence of emotional factors on stakeholders' behavior and decision-making processes within PPP projects. The paper integrates three emotional state functions—optimism, pessimism and rationality—into the PPP framework, highlighting the intricate interactions among the government, private sector, surrounding public and the media. Furthermore, the paper amalgamates the evolutionary pathways of environmental rights incidents with the media's role. Through equilibrium analysis and numerical simulation, the paper delves into the diverse interplay of emotions across different phases of the environmental rights incident, assessing the impact of these emotions on the evolutionary game's equilibrium results.

Emotions significantly influence the microlevel decisions of PPP stakeholders, adapting continually based on event dynamics and media influences. When the private sector demonstrates optimism and the surrounding public leans toward rationality or pessimism, the likelihood of the private sector engaging in speculative behavior escalates, while the surrounding public refrains from adopting a supervisory strategy. Conversely, when the private sector is pessimistic and the public is optimistic, the system fails to evolve a stable strategy. However, when government regulation intensifies, the private sector opts for a nonspeculative strategy, and the surrounding public adopts a supervisory strategy. Under these conditions, the system attains a relatively optimal state of equilibrium.

The paper develops a game model to examine the evolutionary dynamics between the surrounding public and private sectors concerning environmental rights protection in waste incineration PPP projects. It illuminates the nature of the conflicting interests among project participants, delves into the impact of emotional factors on their decision-making processes and offers crucial perspectives for the governance of such partnerships. Furthermore, this paper provides substantive recommendations for emotional oversight to enhance governance efficacy.

Set-based design (SBD) is a lean tool widely adopted for improving design processes and providing value maximization to clients. The purpose of this paper is to present the development and testing of a lean simulation game that incorporated point-based and SBD principles. The objective of the game was to enhance learning of lean design management among construction students.

After a thorough and comprehensive literature review consisting of secondary data in journal papers, books, thesis references and primary data in the form of interviews with lean practitioners, the simulation game prototype was developed. The testing of the game was carried out with a study group. Data were collected during the gameplay with the help of a questionnaire survey on a confidence scale and Likert scale and assessed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, histogram, one-sample t-test and false discovery rate (Benjamini–Hochberg) correction method.

The data collected both pre- and post-simulation showed an increase in average confidence in understanding from 3.33 to 3.89, a 16.7% rise. The data was further interpreted by using Wilcoxon signed-rank test, indicating that the post-simulation learning experience was significantly better than the pre-simulation one. Promising positive results were obtained for the questions on game design, engagement and understanding of point-based design and SBD concepts.

The simulation game helps bridge the gap between knowledge building and real-life by effectively imitating the process. The game facilitates a dynamic and critical approach toward developing new educational simulation games and their successful incorporation in propagating lean principles in the construction industry.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

The main objective of this research was to combine the integration between two fields of knowledge – future-oriented technology analysis (FTA) and games. This study aims to capture the stakeholders’ actions and decision-making in a procedural, interactive and collaborative way to find a vision of the future.

The framework was designed from a literature review on the related research topics, exploring elements and methods, also how we brought the two fields together. The framework was structured in four steps: exploring – deciding – matching – evaluating. For each phase, deep reflections were described to understand the current situation, identify essential future issues and provide recommendations for action.

One attractive aspect of the FTA-games is the characteristics of each field but combined made it possible to evaluate future developments and trends. The elements present in games can boost FTA activities through interaction, engagement, experiences, collaboration and motivation, among other elements. Systematically, we seek to ensure traceability by identifying challenges, solutions, execution and results achieved and using tools and elements that make prospecting practical.

This article systematizes the connection between two fields in the form of a framework. At each stage of the framework, participants and strategists are challenged to seek solutions to future challenges, allowing these participants to engage in a common cause and make actions tangible. Game elements can be shaped to explore new avenues in FTA activities, as they are used in games in specific subject domains. These fields tend to be fragmented and are not integrated.

The study aims to investigate the effect of cultural alignment and value congruency between children and founder on intergenerational succession and on the observation of family optimal outcomes.

A game-theoretical approach is used to develop a sequential game modeling the strategic interactions behind successor selection. The authors test its main predictions by conducting an experiment with 75 subjects.

A theoretical prediction that misalignment between children and founder leads to outcomes without intergenerational succession, or to outcomes with intergenerational succession that are not family optimal. These predictions are buttressed by our experiment, which also found evidence that the family optimal outcome is focal when there are multiple equilibria.

No light is thrown on the sources of cultural (mis)alignment, but only on some of its consequences. Further studies of a different nature are needed to better understand the former.

Cultural diffusion and value congruency within the family should be timely fostered to promote harmony during the succession process and raise the chances of successful succession.

The cultural alignment and value congruency between incumbent and successors is treated as shaping the incentives that both types of agents face in the successor-selection process. Further, experimental techniques have not been used to test the results obtained in games exploring issues in family firm succession. This paper aims to begin filling this gap.

In the context of constructing an integrated national strategic system, collaborative innovation among enterprises is the current social focus. Therefore, in order to find the interest relationship between multiple game subjects, to explore the influencing factors of collaborative innovation of civil-military integration enterprises. This paper constructs a collaborative innovation mechanism for military–civilian integration involving four game subjects (military enterprises, private enterprises, local governments, and science and technology intermediaries). It aims to solve and reveal the evolutionary game relationship among the four parties.

To explore the mechanism of military–civilian collaborative innovation involving four players, this study employs game theory and constructs an evolutionary game model for collaborative innovation with the participation of military enterprises, civilian enterprises, local governments, and technology intermediaries. The model reveals the evolutionary game patterns among these four entities, analyzes the impact of various parameters on the evolutionary process of the game system, and numerical simulation is used to show these changes more specifically.

The research findings demonstrate that active government subsidies promote cooperation throughout the system. Moreover, increasing the input-output ratio of research and development (R&D), the rate of technological spillovers, and the R&D investment of civilian enterprises all facilitate the tendency toward cooperation within the system. However, when the government chooses to actively provide subsidies, increasing R&D investment in military enterprises may hinder the tendency toward cooperation. Furthermore, central transfer payments, government punishment from the central government, and an increase in the information conversion rate of technology intermediaries may suppress the rate of cooperation within the system.

Most of the previous studies on the collaborative innovation of military–civilian integration have been tripartite game models between military enterprises, private enterprises, and local governments. In contrast, this study adds science and technology intermediaries on this basis, reveals the evolution mechanism of collaborative innovation of civil-military integration enterprises from the perspective of four-party participation, and analyzes the factors influencing the cooperation of the whole system. The conclusion of this study not only enriches the collaborative innovation evolution mechanism of military–civilian integration enterprises from the perspective of multiple agents but also provides practical guidance for the innovation-driven development of military–civilian integration enterprises.

This paper develops a theoretical model that analyzes the decision problem the landowner has to face between the construction of second homes and hotels. The starting point implies verifying that for a given tourist destination, the land available for the construction of accommodation is limited. For this reason, when choosing between building second homes or building hotels, many factors influence the decision model. The theoretical mechanism generalizes the model introduced in Brida and Boffa (2010) and is based on a four-stage sequential game with four players. From the results of the model, the authors conclude that it is optimal from the social point of view both to build a hotel and to build a second home because both generate added value during the year. For this reason, the construction of second homes should be taken into account in the planning policy of the tourist destination. This arises from considering that second homes, as they remain occupied all year like hotels, in certain tourist destinations, do not generate seasonality.

In demand-driven markets, customer value, sometimes called perceived use value or consumer surplus, is defined by the customer rather than the firm. The value a firm can appropriate, its profits, is driven by the customer’s willingness to pay for the value they receive, adjusted by costs. This paper introduces a conceptual framework that helps understand value creation and appropriation in demand-driven markets and shows how to influence them through strategic decision-making.

This paper uses an axiomatic approach combined with an extended analytical formulation of the jobs-to-be-done framework to contextualise demand-driven markets. It mathematically derives implications for managerial decision-making concerning selecting customer segments, optimising customer value creation and maximising firm value appropriation in a competitive environment.

Rooting strategic decision-making in the jobs-to-be-done framework allows distinguishing between what customers want to achieve (goal), what product attributes need to be satisfied (opportunity space/constraints) and what value creation criteria related to features are important (utility function). This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done, the problem of identifying which customer segments to serve, what product to offer and what price to charge, can be formulated as an optimisation problem that simultaneously (rather than sequentially) solves for the three decision variables, customer segments, product features and price, by maximising the value that a firm can appropriate, subject to maximising customer value creation and constrained by the competitive environment.

Applying the derived results to simultaneously deciding which customer segments to target, what product features to offer and what price to charge, given a set of competing products, allows managers to increase their chances of winning the competitive game.

This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done and simultaneously focusing on customers, product features, price and competitors enhances firm profitability. Strategic decision-making is formulated as an optimisation problem based on an axiomatic approach contextualising demand-driven markets.

This paper investigates how the channel leadership strategies develop a post-coronavirus disease (COVID-19) resilient agri-supply chain, which reduces supplier and retailer's price loss and enhances the logistics service quality level considering logistics outsourcing of agri-product especially for the rapidly changing market condition.

Based on the classical leadership theory, two channel leadership strategies, i.e. LPL and SL, are considered. The proposed framework first derives the equilibrium price and service quality level decision among the supplier, the logistics provider and the retailer. Then it compares both leadership strategies in terms of the equilibrium prices and service quality theoretically. This article also presents a case study of Arabian dates pricing and supply chain to test the theoretically derived propositions.

Selection of suitable leadership strategy is a critical factor for profit maximization of the supply chain drivers and proper optimization of equilibrium price and service quality. Here, the product's quality and the market's socio-economic condition play an important role in selecting a suitable leadership strategy. A random transformation of the physical market to an e-commerce portal creates a wide variation of the market's socio-economic parameters, affecting the equilibrium pricing and the logistics provider's service quality.

This study proposes a post-COVID-19 resilient agri-supply chain framework considering price and quality-dependent stochastic market demand, incorporating a wide range of socio-economic factors in the model to counteract the effect of rapid behavior change of agri-market due to COVID-19 norms. This research examines the effect of different channel leadership strategies to facilitate suitable decisions on prices and service quality and retrieve the profit of the supplier, retailer and logistics provider. The future models can incorporate competitiveness in logistics outsourcing, fourth-party logistics (4PL) and contract farming in the agri-supply chain. Each of the extensions can open avenues in different directions.

As the post-COVID-19 market and the customer behavior is randomly changing, and the traditional market is rapidly converting into supermarkets and e-commerce portals, this paper examines the model with a wide variety of e-commerce portals with multi-variation of product. It is conclusive that the product's quality and the market's socio-economic behavior significantly impact the equilibrium decision. The drivers of the supply chain must take them into account before choosing a particular channel leadership strategy.

This study considers a multi-product and multi-market (e-commerce) model by integrating a wide variety of products and the market's socio-economic parameters. The model is tested in a price and quality-dependent stochastic market condition, contributing to the literature by reconciling two different channel leadership strategies into the global logistics of fresh agri-product.