A cooperative game theoretic approach for the ordering problem in supply chain

In Supply Chain Management, several costs should be taken into account. They cover all of the holding, purchasing, ordering and transportation. Minimizing costs may be done through considering each cost separately or all of them simultaneously. In this paper, we focus on the ordering problem. In a cooperative context, two major fundamental relations were studied: the first one considers the possible coalitions between the retailers, while the second one studies the assignment between suppliers and coaltions. Our contribution is based on a comparative study of two noteworthy methods of the well-known Game Theory, Nash equilibrium and the Core solutions in an attempt to find the optimal one. To do so, an application is developed to conduct the comparison.