Studies on horizontal cooperation among homogenous retailers based on multi-agent simulation

This paper adopts agent-based simulation to study the horizontal cooperation among homogenous price-setting retailers in a one-to-many supply chain (one supplier and multiple retailers). We model the supplier and retailers as agents, and design their behaviour rules respectively. In our previous paper we have shown that although the agents learn individually based on their own experiences, the system converges asymptotically to near Nash equilibrium. In this paper, based on the property of convergence, we design a series of experiments to investigate different retailers' coalition structures, through which we study whether retailers will form stable coalitions, and what coalition structures they will eventually take.