طراحی استراتژی های قیمت گذاری داخلی و شبیه سازی در شکل گیری سازمان مجازی

A virtual enterprise (VE) is an organization intended to cope with the rapidly changing manufacturing environment. Organization building is important in virtual domains because it has largely been affecting the success of VEs. However, the process of forming a VE is based on self-determination by the participants. This paper adopts a bargaining model under a scenario of incomplete information to formalize the formation process, considers the characteristics of the VE formation process, presents the pricing strategies for the corresponding bargaining, and verifies the correctness and validity of the pricing strategies using computer simulation. This paper breaks through the relative research that compares the formation process with partner selection from the core enterprise’s perspective and also provides the basis for the intelligent information platform of VE, whose key part is pricing software.

With the rapid globalization, agile manufacturing (AM) was proposed by Nagel and Dove (1991) to satisfy the diversified demands of consumers. In this scenario, the design, development, and manufacturing of products are distributed in geographically different sites, and they are carried out by a so-called virtual enterprise (VE) (Dove, 1995). As pointed out by Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh (1999), a VE is a temporary alliance of enterprises for sharing skills or core competencies and resources to respond to business opportunities. The cooperation among these enterprises is supported by computer networks. The life cycle of a VE has four stages: formation, operation, evolution, and dissolution (Dess, Rasheed, McLaughlin, & Priem, 1996). When an enterprise has a market opportunity, which is denoted as the core enterprise, it searches potential partners and negotiates with them through information infrastructure. After contracts are signed, a VE is created for the manufacturing of a product. The VE then manages the manufacturing process of a product. When the product is completed, and a new market opportunity is created, the VE can be reconfigured to meet resource requirements. When the mission of the VE is fulfilled, the VE is finally dissolved. In other words, a VE is characterized by frequent reconfigurations (Wu & Su, 2005). The formation process influences the stability of an alliance. Many research works have described the formation process based on partner selection. However, the perspective neglects self-determination during the organization-creating process. On the other hand, given that market mechanism can optimally allocate resource based on the pricing system, we believe in the same bargaining process to describe the formation process of VE to deal with the conflicting utility between the core enterprise and the partners. Designing the VE formation process based on internal bargaining is shown in Fig. 1Based on Fig. 1 an enterprise has the market opportunity to become the core enterprise. First, the core enterprise decomposes the market opportunity to n task (n is a positive integer). Second, bargaining occurs between the core enterprise and one qualified potential partner for one task. If the two parts reach an agreement and sign the corresponding contract, the core enterprise starts bargaining with other candidates. The VE will be created until it successfully signs the contracts for each task. This paper is a preliminary study on this direction. It is composed of four parts. In the first part, the paper formalizes the parameters and process of the bargaining for the formation of a VE. During the bargaining, both sides choose the pricing strategy to maximize utility. In the second part, the paper presents the pricing strategies for core enterprise (the same analysis could occur in the potential partner) under time limitation, with the opponent’s reserved price unknown. In the third part, the paper simulates the internal bargaining process during which the players adopt the strategies presented in the paper and compare the outcome with the ones produced by linear pricing strategy. By analyzing the simulation consequence, the validity and advantage of the pricing strategies that the participants adopt may be verified. In the last part, the paper summarizes the research work and plans future work.

VE is a promising organization structure for globalization. However, the formation of a VE is also a key stage for determining performance. The existing research compares the process of formation with partner selection without considering the partners’ self-determination. All the participants can offer their own price, thus showing the equality and self-determination among the members through the internal bargaining process. This paper formalizes the basic bargaining model based on the VE formation characteristics. It then presents the corresponding pricing strategies under incomplete information. Finally, computer simulation proves that the pricing strategies presented in the paper are efficient, attractive, and can improve the ratio of success than do the linear ones. This paper takes the first step in introducing bargaining to the formation of VE. This paper supposes that the information state is static and is thus different from the pricing process in reality. In future works, we recommend that (1) building a learning mechanism to modify the information state according to the pricing history and environment data is needed. To build the dynamic information state, Zhang, Liu, and Zhu (2008) introduced the theory of Fuzzy Cognitive Time Maps (FCTMs) into modeling and evaluating trust relationships, and showed how relevant the inter-organizational trust based on trust sources and their credibility is. This study provides us with some advice. First, it addresses the essential factors of trust in the VEs’ situation by examining the triple relations of trust factors. Second, the paper proposes a methodology by considering the dynamic nature of trust to analyze the evolution of trust in the VE setting. (2) We also recommend conducting research on the pricing strategy involving multi-issues. Multi-issue pricing strategies require a trade-off model and a computable algorithm, which are the aims of the on-going research.