Co-opetition and Investment for Supply-Chain Resilience

This paper considers the problem of disruption risk management in global supply chains. We consider a supply chain with two participants, who face interdependent losses resulting from supply chain disruptions such as terrorist strikes and natural hazards. The Harsanyi-Selten-Nash bargaining framework is used to model the supply chain participants' choice of risk mitigation investments. The bargaining approach allows a framing of both joint financing of mitigation activities before the fact and loss-sharing net of insurance payouts after the fact. The disagreement outcome in the bargaining game is assumed to be the result of the corresponding non-cooperative game. We describe an incentive-compatible contract that leads to First Best investment and equal "gain" for all players, when the solution is "interior" (as it almost certainly is in practice). A supplier that has superior security practices (i.e., is inherently safer) exploits its informational advantage by extracting an "information rent" in the usual spirit of incomplete information games. We also identify a special case of this contract, which is robust to moral hazard. The role of auditing in reinforcing investment incentives is also examined.