Information sharing in supply chain collaboration

There are well-documented examples of successful, mutually beneficial collaborations in supply chains; however, the failure rate of collaborations that are initiated is surprisingly high. This research focuses on one cornerstone of a successful collaboration, information sharing. The idea is to help companies who are considering a collaborative opportunity to evaluate the value of the information that would be shared so efforts are only expended on potential collaborations that have an acceptable reward for the risk. This proposed methodology is an optimality-based approach that uses game theory and considers information sharing in both the competition-cooperation and coopetition environments. Value is first assigned to information along several dimensions that allows payoff matrices to be constructed. Using these, Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimality are used to provide insights for decision makers.