EAGER: Negotiated Resource Sharing Strategies to Facilitate New Product Introductions

新产品的推出是许多行业竞争的重要基础。新产品引进的有效管理需要不同部门之间的协作和协调，如销售和营销、制造和产品工程。每个单位控制着一些关键的资源和信息，但依赖于来自其他单位的资源和信息来履行其职能。由此产生的具有不同目标的单位之间对制造能力的竞争，往往由中央决策者进行仲裁，可能会导致延迟的、次优的决策。这一早期概念探索性研究补助金(AGIRE)项目研究新的、分散的方法的机会，这些方法鼓励职能单位之间共享信息，以提供更好的替代集中控制的方法。该项目将为多方谈判带来新的见解，并通过深入了解如何更好地管理工业、非营利和国防环境中的新产品引入，为国家福利做出贡献。该奖项将为一名与国际和平研究所合作的研究生提供支持。该项目将评估两种构建分散决策的新方法的优点。第一个将涉及算法博弈论的新兴领域，以开发计算高效的近似算法来确定这些问题的均衡解。第二个将涉及组合拍卖的研究，在组合拍卖中，每个单位在不同的时间段竞标制造能力。博弈论和组合拍卖的广泛文献为开发这个问题的新公式提供了机会。有几种研究针对问题的不同方面，但目前没有一种能够对问题的所有方面进行建模，甚至是简化版本。因此，在目前的知识阶段，尚不清楚利用这些工具协调一致地解决这一问题应该采取什么方向。这个急切的项目的目标是澄清这个问题，确定最有希望的攻击线，同时消除那些不太可能成功的线。

The introduction of new products is an important basis for competition in many industries. Effective management of new product introductions requires collaboration and coordination between different units such as sales and marketing, manufacturing, and product engineering. Each unit controls some critical resources and information, but depends on resources and information from other units to perform its function. The resulting competition for manufacturing capacity between units with different objectives, often arbitrated by a central decision maker, may result in delayed, suboptimal decisions. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project studies the opportunity for new, decentralized approaches that encourage information sharing among functional units to provide better alternatives to centralized control. The project will yield new insights into multiparty negotiation as well as contributing to the national welfare through insights into how to better manage new product introduction in industrial, non-profit and defence environments. The award will provide support for a graduate student working with the PI.This project will evaluate the merits of two novel approaches to structuring decentralized decision making. The first will involve the emerging field of algorithmic game theory to develop computationally efficient approximation algorithms for determining equilibrium solutions for these problems. The second will involve the study of combinatorial auctions, where each unit bids for manufacturing capacity across different time periods. The extensive literature on game theory and combinatorial auctions present an opportunity to develop novel formulations of this problem. Several streams of research address different aspects of the problem, but none is currently capable of modelling even simplified versions of the problem in all aspects. Hence at the current stage of knowledge it is not clear what direction a concerted attack on this problem with these tools should take. The objective of this EAGER project is to clarify this issue, identifying the most promising lines of attack while eliminating those unlikely to succeed.