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单位之间的协作和协调，如销售和市场、制造和产品工程。每个单位控制着一些关键的资源和信息，但又依赖于来自其他单位的资源和信息来执行其功能。具有不同目标的单位之间对制造能力的竞争，通常由中央决策者仲裁，可能导致延迟的、次优的决策。这个探索性研究（EAGER）项目的早期概念资助研究了新的分散式方法的机会，这些方法鼓励功能单元之间的信息共享，以提供比集中控制更好的选择。该项目将对多方谈判产生新的见解，并通过洞察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。该奖项将为与PI一起工作的研究生提供支持。本项目将评估构建分散决策的两种新方法的优点。第一个将涉及算法博弈论的新兴领域，以开发计算效率高的近似算法来确定这些问题的平衡解。第二部分将涉及对组合拍卖的研究，即每个单位在不同时期对制造能力进行投标。博弈论和组合拍卖的广泛文献提供了一个发展这个问题的新公式的机会。研究的几个流解决问题的不同方面，但目前没有一个能够建模，甚至简化版本的问题在所有方面。因此，在目前的知识阶段，尚不清楚使用这些工具对这个问题进行协调一致的攻击应该采取什么方向。这个EAGER项目的目标是澄清这个问题，确定最有希望的攻击路线，同时消除那些不太可能成功的攻击路线。

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.