Coalitional games in evolutionary supply chain networks

We focus on the coalition formation in a supply chain network that consists of three layers of decision-makers, namely, suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers, with prices and shipments that evolve over time. We suppose that some partners in the chain vertically merge each other and act as one player to confront the other players that make their choices independently. In this model, the retailer is the dominant player and is a profit-maximizer. We present a non-cooperative approach to the coalitional game and provide the equilibrium conditions governing the model as well as an equivalent evolutionary variational inequality formulation.