Talking Behind Your Back: Communication and Team Cooperation

Communication is one of the most effective devices in promoting team cooperation. However, asymmetric communication sometimes breeds collusion and hurts team efficiency. Here, we present experimental evidence showing that excluding one member from team communication hurts team cooperation; the communicating partners collude in profit allocation against the excluded member, and the latter reacts by exerting less effort. Allowing the partners to reach out to the excluded member partially restores cooperation and fairness in profit allocation, but it does not stop the partners from talking behind that member’s back even when they could have talked publicly. The partners sometimes game the system by tricking the excluded member into contributing but then grabbing all profits for themselves. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Profit Allocation of Agricultural Machinery Service-Oriented Manufacturing Alliance Based on Modified Shapley Value Method

Shapely value is a method of determining the importance of individuals in the collective, avoiding the equal allocation of profit. The profit allocation on SOM (service-oriented manufacturing) alliance between agricultural machinery manufacturing enterprises and suppliers under the SOM mode is a complex problem restricted by many factors, but the Shapely value method does not consider the differences of member enterprises. Therefore, factors that affect the profit allocation are given in this paper, such as input level, effort level, innovation level, risk factor, and value-added factor. Based on these factors, the Euclidean distance is used to modify the traditional TOPSIS method to determine the profit allocation correction coefficient, and the GRA (grey relational analysis) is introduced into the TOPSIS method to calculate the closeness degree, which reflects the position relationship and consistency of data curve. Based on the modified Shapley value method, a profit allocation method of agricultural machinery service-oriented manufacturing alliance is constructed. Finally, an application example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

An intelligent cross-border transaction system based on consortium blockchain: A case study in Shenzhen, China

Cross-border transactions have been more and more popular around the world. However, the current cross-border transactions still have risks and challenges, e.g., differences in regulation policies and unbalanced profits of banks. To address this critical issue, we construct a new framework for the transaction system with the support of blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose a new consortium blockchain system, namely asymmetric consortium blockchain (ACB), to ensure the implementation of cross-border transactions. Different from traditional consortium blockchain, the new blockchain system could support the supernode to regulate all the transactions timely. Furthermore, the new smart contract is designed to lower the opportunity loss for each node and make the profits allocation system fairer. In the end, the numerical experiments were carried out based on the transactions of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The results show that the proposed ACB system is efficient to make the profit allocation fairer for the participants and keep intelligent for the new cross-border transaction system.

Coordination of a fresh agricultural product supply chain with option contract under cost and loss disruptions

This paper analyzes the option coordination problem of a fresh agricultural product supply chain under two supply chain structures, when the production cost and the loss rate are disrupted simultaneously. This paper provides the explicit option coordination conditions for the disrupted supply chain under two supply chain structures, and then explores the effects of the disruptions and supply chain structure on the option coordination conditions. The results suggest that it is unfavorable to apply the original coordinating contracts without disruptions to coordinate the disrupted supply chain. The coordination of the disrupted supply chain can be achieved with knowledge of the distribution of demand. In two coordinating contracts for the disrupted supply chain, the exercise price is still at the original level without disruptions while the option price deviates from the original level without disruptions. Moreover, the relationships of the coordination conditions in two supply chain structures depend on the value of the profit allocation coefficient. When the profit allocation coefficient exceeds (falls behind) a certain threshold, the option price is set at a higher (lower) value in the supplier-led supply chain structure than in the distributor-led supply chain structure, while the exercise price is set at a lower (higher) value in the supplier-led supply chain structure than in the distributor-led supply chain structure. Finally, the disrupted supply chain with any supply chain structure will perform better in the modified coordinating contracts than in the original coordinating contracts without disruptions.