The coevolution of interconnected relationship strategies in supply networks

Abstract

Supply network (SN) complexity is the main challenge for managers in predicting the consequences of their firm’s relationship strategy decisions. The number of relationships and their interconnectedness constitute SN complexity and moreover, a firm’s relationships inside an SN are coevolved. It is, therefore, important to investigate how a specific relationship strategy has connected and coevolved with other types of relationship strategies in the context of a specific business situation and the interaction policies of firms. What kind of attractors of interconnected relationships will emerge?To address these issues, we model firms’ interactions inside an SN using cellular automata and complex adaptive system perspectives. Several micro-rules that mimic the drivers and mechanisms of all archetypes of relationship strategies (i.e. cooperation, defection, competition and co-opetition) were programmed inside agents. Experiments using the prisoner’s dilemma game reward schemes, representing business situation factors, have been built and the results show that the coevolution of interconnected relationship strategies coevolution causes the emergence of interesting attractors.