COOPSS · Cooperation in Service Systems and Service Supply Chains

The recent European economic crisis showed that effective use of resources is more important than ever for sustainability of companies. Inter-organizational cooperation is foreseen as a good opportunity to achieve further efficiency in operations that companies require to stay competitive in a global economy. However, up to now, very little quantitative insights and tools have been developed for managers that can actually help them in establishing such collaboration. In this proposed research, we focus on the difficulties in collaboration of service systems from an economic point of view using the techniques developed in the domain of Game Theory and Operations Research. Our ultimate aim is to create managerial insights that will help the practitioners to form sustainable collaboration by devising tools and rules for stable and fair allocation of benefits. As a fundamental step, the proposed research will investigate cooperative games of service systems and service supply chains in which cooperation by sharing resources improve the systems performance (reduce cost or increase profit). There are only a limited number of studies and little theoretical results in the literature that will help researcher to study these cooperative systems in more detail. This proposal will fill this gap by developing a mathematical framework and theoretical background that will help to characterise the cores of these games as much as possible and hopefully boost further research in the area.This research proposal plays an important role for the reintegration of a researcher with an excellent research record and industry experience to Europe, and will contribute to the European excellence in game theory research and operations management. The project will be executed in cooperation with European and US based researchers and the grant will facilitate the mobility required for intense research collaboration both helping spread of knowledge in EU and bringing outside expertise to EU.