Modeling of Fairness – Distribution of Efficiency Gains in Supply Websfrom a Game-theoretic Point of View

The addressed scientific problem is the purpose to distribute the efficiency gains among partially autonomousactors in a supply web in a manner that the actors accept as fair and thus find it advantageous to cooperate witheach other.There are three reasons why this problem is economically significant. Firstly, it is required to substantiateefficiency gains in an understandable manner. Secondly, supply webs suffer from a conflict potential, since thepartially autonomous actors are trying to maximize their own shares of the efficiency gain. Thirdly, thecooperative game theory offers some solution approaches for distribution problems. These are especially theSHAPLEY value and the Nucleolus. These approaches suffer from a serious drawback: The fairness of thedistribution results is hard to justify, since the logic of these approaches is difficult to communicate.The scientific method applied is (i) in order to solve the substantiation problem and (ii) reconstructing thedistribution problem through a game-theoretic model on basis of the τ-value. The special nature of the τ-valueensures that it seems rational to the actors to cooperate, because the distribution results are obtained bysuccessively restricting the solution space with the help of easily understandable rationality principles andintegrity conditions.The expected scientific result is that it is shown how the monetary value of efficiency gains in supply webs canbe established precisely. Moreover, the proposed solution method for the distribution problem offers a fairdistribution of efficiency gains and ensures that the distribution results can be communicated easily.