Trilateral Game Analysis on Information Sharing among Members in a Virtual Team

Information and communication technology has been greatly contributing to the practice of virtual teams. However, the issues of information sharing might affect the performance of virtual teams fundamentally. To improve the cooperation among virtual team members, information sharing in a virtual team deserves more attention from both researchers and practitioners. In this paper, the KMRW model of the game theory is adopted to analyze the existing issues of information sharing among team members and the causes of these issues. Based on the detailed analysis, we find out the conditions of team members stepping out of "prisoner's dilemma". That is, the game proceeds under incomplete information and the members' personalities need to satisfy some specific conditions. Moreover, cooperative equilibrium can come forth as the perfect Bayesian equilibrium, and team members are willing to share information. At the end of this paper, various suggestions are provided for promote the status of information sharing among members in a virtual team and improve the performance of the virtual team.