A Negotiation Game to Support Inter-organizational Business Case Development

Nowadays, an increasing number of organizations in the supply chain are involved in business collaborations. The success of such collaborations is, among others, highly dependent on joint investment in IT system implementations. In this paper we will discuss how business cases can be used to determine the costs and benefits of such investments for each actor. Using design science as a research paradigm we develop a serious game, called SID4IOP, that helps partners in inter-organizational settings to come to an equal distribution of the costs and benefits of an investment. We will show how the introduction of anonymity, a bidding mechanism and structured information disclosure can help project partners to reach agreement on the distribution of the costs.