Stackelberg competition

About: Stackelberg competition is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6611 publications have been published within this topic receiving 109213 citations.

Blockchain Meets Edge Computing: Stackelberg Game and Double Auction Based Task Offloading for Mobile Blockchain

Abstract: Blockchain technology is developing rapidly and has been applied in various aspects, among which there are broad prospects in Internet of Things (IoT). However, IoT mobile devices are restricted in communication and computation due to mobility and portability, so that they can’t afford the high computing cost for blockchain mining process. To solve it, the free resources displayed on non-mining-devices and edge cloud are selected to construct collaborative mining network(CMN) to execute mining tasks for mobile blockchain. Miners can offload their mining tasks to non-mining-devices within a CMN or the edge cloud when there are insufficient resources. Considering competition for resource of non-mining-devices, resource allocation problem in a CMN is formulated as a double auction game, among which Bayes-Nash Equilibrium (BNE) is analyzed to figure out the optimal auction price. When offloading to edge cloud, Stackelberg game is adopted to model interactions between edge cloud operator and different CMNs to obtain the optimal resource price and devices’ resource demands. The mechanism realizes improving the mining utility in mining networks while ensuring the maximum profit of edge cloud operator. Finally, profits of mining networks are compared with an existing mode which only considers offloading to edge cloud. Under the proposed mechanism, mining networks obtain 6.86% more profits on average.

The role of 4PL as the reverse logistics integrator

Abstract: Purpose – An effective return policy is used as an important competitive weapon in the marketplace to substantially influence product sales. However, return policy is also seen as a problem for all parties in the supply chain due to the headache in processing returned merchandise. While retailers are efficient in selling, they do not usually have the expertise in handling the reverse flow. The purpose of this paper is to propose the use of a fourth party logistics (4PL) as a return service provider, and develops optimal decision policies for both the seller and the 4PL.Design/methodology/approach – A profit‐maximization model is presented to jointly obtain optimal policies for the seller and the 4PL through the use of Stackelberg like game theory, where the seller acts as the leader and the 4PL acts as the follower.Findings – Optimal values for the seller's and the 4PL's decisions are presented. Conditions under which profits for the seller and 4PL both increase are shown.Practical implications – This pap...

Supply Chain Contracting under Competition: Bilateral Bargaining vs. Stackelberg

Abstract: We analyze contracting behaviors in a two-tier supply chain system consisting of competing manufacturers and competing retailers. We contrast the contracting outcome of a Stackelberg game, in which the manufacturers offer take-it-or-leave-it contracts to the retailers, with that of a bargaining game, in which the firms bilaterally negotiate contract terms via a process of alternating offers. The manufacturers in the Stackelberg game possess a Stackelberg-leader advantage in that the retailers are not entitled to make counteroffers. Our analysis suggests that whether this advantage would benefit the manufacturers depends on the contractual form. With simple contracts such as wholesale-price contracts, which generally do not allow one party to fully extract the trade surplus, the Stackelberg game replicates the boundary case of the bargaining game with the manufacturers possessing all bargaining power. In contrast, with sophisticated contracts such as two-part tariffs, which enable full surplus extraction, the two games lead to distinct outcomes. We further show that the game structure being Stackelberg or bargaining critically affects firms’ preferences over contract types and thus their equilibrium contract choices. These observations suggest that the Stackelberg game may not be a sufficient device to predict contracting behaviors in reality where bargaining is commonly observed.

Stackelberg games and multiple equilibrium behaviors on networks

Abstract: The classical Wardropian principle assumes that users minimize either individual travel cost or overall system cost. Unlike the pure Wardropian equilibrium, there might be in reality both competition and cooperation among users, typically when there exist oligopoly Cournot-Nash (CN) firms. In this paper, we first formulate a mixed behavior network equilibrium model as variational inequalities (VI) that simultaneously describe the routing behaviors of user equilibrium (UE), system optimum (SO) and CN players, each player is presumed to make routing decision given knowledge of the routing strategies of other players. After examining the existence and uniqueness of solutions, the diagonalization approach is applied to find a mixed behavior equilibrium solution. We then present a Stackelberg routing game on the network in which the SO player is the leader and the UE and CN players are the followers. The UE and CN players route their flows in a mixed equilibrium behavior given the SO player’s routing strategy. In contrast, the SO player, realizing how the UE and CN players react to the given strategy, routes its flows to minimize total system travel cost. The Stackelberg game of network flow routing is formulated as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). Using a marginal function approach, the MPEC is transformed into an equivalent, continuously differentiable single-level optimization problem, where the lower level VI is represented by a differentiable gap function constraint. The augmented Lagrangian method is then used to solve the resulting single-level optimization problem. Some numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the proposed models and algorithms.