How altruism works: An evolutionary model of supply networks

Recently, supply networks have attracted increasing attention from the scientific community. However, it lacks serious consideration of social preference in Supply Chain Management. In this paper, we develop an evolutionary decision-making model to characterize the effects of suppliers’ altruism in supply networks, and find that the performances of both suppliers and supply chains are improved by introducing the role of altruism. Furthermore, an interesting and reasonable phenomenon is discovered that the suppliers’ and whole network’s profits do not change monotonously with suppliers’ altruistic preference, η, but reach the best at η = 0.6 and η = 0.4, respectively. This work may shed some light on the in-depth understanding of the effects of altruism for both research and commercial applications. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.