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Supply chain network competition among blood service organizations: a Generalized Nash Equilibrium framework

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Abstract

In this paper we present a Generalized Nash Equilibrium model of supply chain network competition among blood service organizations which compete not only for blood donors but also for business from hospitals and medical centers. The model incorporates not only link capacities and associated arc multipliers to capture perishability, but also bounds on the number of donors in regions as well as lower and upper bounds on the demands at the demand points in order to ensure needed amounts for surgeries, treatments, etc., while reducing wastage. The concept of a variational equilibrium is utilized to transform the problem into a variational inequality problem, and alternative formulations are given. A Lagrange analysis yields economic insights. The proposed algorithmic procedure is then applied to a series of numerical examples in order to illustrate the impacts of disruptions in the form of a reduction on the number of donors as well as that of decreases in capacities of critical links such as testing and processing on RBC prices, demands, net revenues of the blood service organizations, and their overall utilities.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge helpful conversations with Dr. Louis Katz, Michael Merola, Dr. David Wellis, Beau Tompkins and Professor Amir H. Masoumi. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewer and the editor for taking the time to read the paper. The first author also acknowledges support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she was a Summer Fellow in 2018, and from the John F. Smith Memorial Foundation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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  1. Department of Operations and Information Management, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA

    Anna Nagurney & Pritha Dutta

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Correspondence to Anna Nagurney.

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Nagurney, A., Dutta, P. Supply chain network competition among blood service organizations: a Generalized Nash Equilibrium framework. Ann Oper Res 275, 551–586 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-018-3029-2

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