Organizational coordination in sustainable humanitarian supply chain: An evolutionary game approach

Sustainable humanitarian supply chain has a great impact on saving lives, decreasing human suffering and contributing to development. Organizational coordination plays an important role in it, although it is uncommon to be established due to the conflicting interests and expectations. To cope with the problem and achieve the sustainability of humanitarian supply chain, the coordination between private sector and humanitarian organization was further discussed with the help of sustainable principle regarding stakeholder approach. Different from the existing literature that elaborated the drivers and the advantages of coordination, this paper aims to explore the coordination mechanism regarding whether to coordinate, when to adopt the optimal coordinated strategy and how such a strategy can perform well. To analyze the tendency of the coordinated decisions, evolutionary game models concerning traditional and trust mechanisms were developed. Then, computational studies based on hypothetic data were simulated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Results indicated that the coordination decision was affected by coordinated returns and costs, normal returns and extra returns in terms of the traditional mechanism. Several situations in regard to the coordinated decisions were analyzed by adopting evolutionary stable strategies. Moreover, trust had a significantly positive impact on coordination promotion under the support of potential returns and high-level trust. Finally, managerial insights for achieving the sustainable humanitarian supply chain were given from the perspective of organizational coordination and strategy. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.