A strategic bargaining decision support model for project-based alliance

Project businesses and project-based strategic alliances have become an innovative business model to obtain synergistic competitiveness in the highly competitive market. However, in the practices of the alliances, conflicts and bargaining between team members are frequently occurred, while companies are seeking to maximize their own profits in the course of executing the cooperative project. Thus, to satisfy both parties, a bargaining decision support model is of great necessity for estimating the acceptable rewards of the cooperative parties which is crucial for enhancing the possibility of reaching a win-win agreement in the bargaining. In this paper, we develop a sequential bargaining model to support strategic bargaining decisions. The model, based on Dynamics Game Theory, can estimate acceptable prices for participants in accordance with each party's costs and needs for the project's revenue. Since the partner's qualification and reputation constitute certain risks of the alliance, the alliance risk discount factors are additionally considered in the proposed model by incorporating fuzzy sets and utility-based assessment methods. The integrated model enables strategic-alliance companies to estimate their bargaining positions in different cases and select proper bargaining strategies in a systematic and rational manner, so as to maintain their right businesses.