A novel cooperative game-based method to coordinate a sustainable supply chain under psychological uncertainty in fairness concerns

Abstract

This paper investigates how retailers’ fairness concerns affect cooperative relationships in a three-party sustainable supply chain (TSSC) and how to coordinate such a supply chain when the degree of fairness concern is treated as an interval. Utilizing the Nash equilibrium strategy, this study seeks equilibrium solutions and profits under five non-cooperative and cooperative models and reveals that fairness concerns indeed affect members’ decisions and their cooperation for sustainable supply chain management. Furthermore, we develop a novel coordination method by incorporating the interval-valued least square pre-nucleolus (IVLSPN) approach and the three-party Nash bargaining game model to perfectly coordinate this TSSC.