A multi-agent model of cooperative and competitive strategies in supply chain

This paper proposes a multi-agent model to simulate cooperative and competitive behavior between companies at the same level in the supply chain within a single market. We analyze the networks generated by our model and find interesting findings about the evolution of cooperation through time. These results suggest that strictly competitive strategies are more effective at generating multiple cooperative behavior between firms than strictly long-term complementary/cooperative strategies in the view of the whole system. Yet, in a real business context, firms tend to be co-opetitive, a strategy that we show to be the most efficient in the long run at decreasing firmspsila average production cost and increasing firmspsila number of ldquobusiness friendsrdquo.