Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
Volume 274, Issue 1, Pages 126-141Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.09.045
Keywords
Humanitarian logistics; Outsourcing; Logistics service provision; Game theory; Variational inequality
Funding
- Austrian Science Fund FWF [26015]
- Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University
- John F. Smith Memorial Fund at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) [PON SCN 00451]
- Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [P26015] Funding Source: Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Due to restricted budgets of relief organizations, costs of hiring transportation service providers steer distribution decisions and limit the impact of disaster relief. To improve the success of future humanitarian operations, it is of paramount importance to understand this relationship in detail and to identify mitigation actions, always considering the interdependencies between multiple independent actors in humanitarian logistics. In this paper, we develop a game-theoretic model in order to investigate the influence of transportation costs on distribution decisions in long-term relief operations and to evaluate measures for improving the fulfillment of beneficiary needs. The equilibrium of the model is a Generalized Nash Equilibrium, which has had few applications in the supply chain context to date. We formulate it, utilizing the construct of a Variational Equilibrium, as a Variational Inequality and perform numerical simulations in order to study the effects of three interventions: an increase in carrier competition, a reduction of transportation costs and an extension of framework agreements. The results yield important implications for policy makers and humanitarian organizations (HOs). Increasing the number of preselected carriers strengthens the bargaining power of HOs and improves impact up to a certain limit. The limit is reached when carriers set framework rates equal to transportation unit costs. Reductions of transportation costs have a consistently positive, but decreasing marginal benefit without any upper bound. They provide the highest benefit when the bargaining power of HOs is weak. On the contrary, extending framework agreements enables most improvements when the bargaining power of HOs is strong. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available