Boosting Co-Opetition with Fair Sharing Approach for Inter-Organizational Information Systems

In the modern environment characterized by the competition not only among individual companies but among business networks as well, inter-organizational information systems (IOSs) play an important role as building blocks of the network information infrastructure. Despite many technological advancements of last decades many enterprises still face difficulties with IOS adoption. The need for co-opetition, simultaneous competition and cooperation, among community members and uneven distribution of benefits among them have been often named as barriers for IOS adoption. In this paper we develop an analytical model of fair sharing for IOS users based on Shapley value principle to address these issues. The use of Shapley value ensures that rational interests of individual members get aligned with the interests of the community as a whole. We demonstrate that such a fair sharing scheme can create additional incentives for co-opetition between competitors by estimating the value gain for a data provider that comes from participation of another data provider. The size of positive externalities between providers depends on the network structure which in its turn determines the importance of coordination between competitors for IOS adoption. In the high density networks the benefits from coordination are higher than in the low density networks.

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