João Pedro Pedroso

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
We study the strategical behaviour of firms facing a lot-sizing problem with Cournot competition. Each player is a firm with her own production facility, modeled as an uncapacitated lot-sizing problem (Le., production incurs set-up and variable costs and inventories are allowed). A Cournot competition is played in each time period (market) with each player deciding the quantity of product to place on it. The market price of that product in each time period depends on the total quantity placed in the market. We show that this is a potential game with possibly multiple pure Nash equilibria. We then investigate the plausibility of these equilibria to predict the game outcome by evaluating the difficulty of computing them. If the game has a single period, we prove that an equilibrium can be found in polynomial time, but it is weakly NP hard to find an optimal pure Nash equilibrium (with respect to a given equilibrium refinement). If the game has no variable production and inventory costs, we prove that a pure Nash equilibrium can be computed in polynomial time.

Abstract
For the predicted growth of e-commerce, supply chains need to adapt to new conditions, so that delivery can be fast, cheap and reliable. The key to success is the last-mile product delivery (LMD) - the last stage of the supply chain, where the ordered product is delivered to the final consumer's location. One innovative proposal puts foundations in a new delivery model where a professional delivery fleet (PF) is supplemented partially or fully with crowdshipping. The main idea of crowdshipping is to involve ordinary people - in our case in-store shoppers - in the delivery of packages to other customers. In return, occasional couriers (OC) are offered a small compensation. In hitherto formulated problems it was assumed that OCs always accept delivery tasks assigned to them. In this paper we consider OCs as independent agents, which are free to reject assignments. The main contribution of the paper is an original bi-level methodology for matching and routing problem in LMD with OCs and the PF. The goal is to use crowdshipping to reduce the total delivery cost in a same-day last-mile delivery system with respect to occasional couriers' freedom to accept or reject the assigned delivery. We introduce probability to represent each OC's willingness to perform the delivery to a given final customer. We study the OCs' willingness to accept or reject delivery tasks assigned to them and the influence of their decision on the total delivery cost associated to both the OCs' compensation fees and the delivery cost generated by the PF used for the delivery of remaining parcels. © 2018 The Author(s).

Abstract
We aim to investigate a new class of games, where each player's set of strategies is a union of polyhedra. These are called integer programming games. To motivate our work, we describe some practical examples suitable to be modeled under this paradigm. We analyze the problem of determining whether or not a Nash equilibria exists for an integer programming game, and demonstrate that it is complete for the second level of the polynomial hierarchy.