Modelling enterprise co-opetition

Abstract

In the recent years co-opetition has emerged as a new theoretical concept, emphasizing the concurrency of competition and cooperation in business relationships. It is considered as an integrative bridge between older contributions which one-sidedly emphasize either competition or cooperation. However, the co-opetition theory is barely applicable for problems of relationships between enterprises because of structural and methodical flaws. Therefore a framework for the modelling of enterprise co-opetition is introduced. A definition for the term co-opetition and determinants of co-opetition models are introduced, which are external institutions, several industrial boundaries and time. An industrial supply chain is introduced as one of the industrial boundaries in co-opetition models that considers the impact of potential participants and distinguishes between individual customers and mass markets. A profit distribution rule is introduced for supply chains with individual customers, which considers the impact of excluded suppliers and can be used for the prediction of the outcome of auctions. It is shown for both mass markets and individual customers in how far stable agreements can be achieved, facing the problem of ubiquitous time- inconsistency of agreements. It is shown in which cases the introduced profit distribution rule recommends more stable negotiation outcomes than the Aumann-Drèze-rule and the Myerson-rule for coalition structures. Ideal-typical cases of industrial supply chains with mass markets and individual customers are simulated with the software “MATLAB”. Experiments are implemented with test persons via the internet with the software “z-tree”. These experiments are intended to verify the theoretical predictions about the negotiation outcomes and the agreement stability.