Two’s company, three’s a crowd: on the bystander effect and other barriers to collaboration in multi-stage supply chains
研究了多阶段供应链中经济与行为障碍如何导致协作失败，发现三阶段以上存在旁观者效应，并提出一种捐赠机制来促进协作。
Multi-stage collaborations in supply chains can reap efficiency benefits and mitigate risks but often fail due to complex behavioural and economic barriers. This research challenges the assumption that findings from analysing 2-stage supply chain collaboration can be extended to multi-stage collaboration by considering both economic and behavioural barriers. Specifically, the commonly studied 2-stage supply chain is expanded to a multi-stage supply chain in which stand-alone, dyadic, and collaborative decision-making are evaluated, under both Stackelberg and concurrent optimisation scenarios. The results for three or more supply chain stages differ fundamentally from those when there are only two stages. Under Stackelberg optimisation, despite a win-win collaboration opportunity, entities may not want to collaborate due to what has been coined a behavioural-driven bystander effect: It is more beneficial to be inactive, expecting other entities to collaborate. Under concurrent optimisation, the necessary economic win-win requirement is not fulfilled for three or more supply chain stages. To counter the observed barriers, a novel collaboration donation mechanism is proposed and numerical examples are offered to demonstrate its effectiveness.