Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposed research program deals with: - The modeling of industrial systems involving few players (firms, countries, etc.) having interdependent payoffs. - The determination and the computation of equilibrium solutions for systems characterized by a non cooperative mode of play. - The design of mechanisms, that satisfy certain required properties (e.g., optimality, fairness, individual rationality), for sharing and sustaining over time cooperative outcomes when coordination of strategies is feasible. The research addresses theoretical and computational issues as well as applied problems posed in the areas of: - Environmental management (e.g., coordination of emission strategies among countries, regions or provinces). - Distribution channels (e.g., conflict and cooperation in marketing networks, multiple distribution channels, supply chain management, etc.). Since the problems involve few actors and are highly dynamic, the natural methodological frameworks are those of dynamic game theory and mathematical programming. The main contribution of this program is in introducing dynamics in the analysis of problems which have been studied up to now mainly using static models and in providing novel tools and mechanisms to solve them.