Postgraduate Course: Supply Chain Analytics with Games (CMSE11349)
Course Outline
| School | Business School |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 15 |
ECTS Credits | 7.5 |
| Summary | This is an option course for the MSc in Business Analytics programme with pathway in Operations & Supply Chain Analytics. The course will provide students with the foundations of supply chain games with emphasis on the modelling and analysis of practical situations involving several supply chain players and concerned with a range of decisions relevant to supply chain management. |
| Course description |
Traditional research in operations and supply chain management focused on the decision theoretic perspectives, in which a single decision-making authority optimises the system as a whole under exogenous uncertainty. The past decades saw the evolution of operations and supply chain studies to address management problems with strategic uncertainty, in which different individuals, divisions and/or firms strategically interact with each other. Strategic interactions in multi-agent problems create new challenges for operations and supply chain managers. As a natural quantitative analytical tool for such multi-agent decision making problems, game theory has widely and successfully been applied to the field of operations and supply chain management. This course covers a variety of game theory modelling and analysis tools to provide game-theoretic insights into managerial situations and to assist with decision making when multiple agents with conflicting objectives are involved. To be more specific, it provide students with both cooperative and non-cooperative game theory based quantitative frameworks to analyse strategic interactions in operations and supply chain problems and its impact on managerial decision making and to understand strategic situations in which different individuals/divisions/firms may have potentially conflicting incentives. As to applications, the focus is on practical issues including price and/or quantity competition between suppliers and retailers; inventory problems; decision making on outsourcing; auction, procurement and decision making on price determination; coalitional games and applications to aircraft landing fees problem, river sharing problem, minimum cost spanning tree problem and traveling salesman problem; assignment problems and multi-objective auctions; queuing and scheduling problems, and matching problems such as marriage problems and school choice problems.
The objective of this course is to enhance students' understanding of how a game-theoretic modelling and analysis framework could generate insights and provide solutions to complex supply chain games involving a variety of supply chain players, and to train students to critically assess game theory based analytical models and techniques and choose the appropriate one(s) to address a specific decision problem in a supply chain. The course provides opportunities for students to learn from each other, from practitioners in the field, and from the latest theoretical and applied research in the field. The course will require students to work in groups on realistic projects in different supply chain settings using game analytics, and to present their work to the rest of the class and to an external panel when the projects are supplied by industry.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2017/18, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: None |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
150
(
Lecture Hours 20,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 5,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 3,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
122 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
30 %,
Coursework
70 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Examination
Final exam 30% weighting
Coursework
Term projects 60% weighting
Presentations 10% weighting
- Term projects (60% of the mark) in which students will have to undertake supply chain game projects involving game description and modelling, solution design and analysis, report on findings, formulation of recommendations and managerial guidelines.
- Presentations (10% of the final mark) involving communication of solutions to supply chain games and the methods used to obtain them to demonstrate their ability to address real world decision problems in supply chains and to convince their line managers or sponsors to implement the proposed solutions
- Final exam (30% of the mark) |
| Feedback |
All students will be given at least one formative feedback or feedforward event for every assessment component in the course in time to be useful in the completion of summative work on the course.
Feedback on formative assessed work will be provided within 15 working days of submission, or in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course, whichever is sooner. Summative marks will be returned on a published timetable, which has been made clear to students at the start of the academic year.
Feedback will comprise individual feedback on student assignments and overall exam mark feedback in the form of a report.
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| Exam Information |
| Exam Diet |
Paper Name |
Hours & Minutes |
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| Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May) | Supply Chain Analytics with Games | 2:00 | |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Discuss the concepts and methods of supply chain game analytics using the proper terminology
- Identify strategic situations in which different agents have conflicting incentives and properly describe the related supply chain decision problems, model them as games, choose the right method of analysis and devise a solution
- Interpret solutions, formulate managerial guidelines and make recommendations
- Identify the rationale of the assumptions behind game-theoretic models, describe how such assumptions play in a specific model, and critically evaluate the appropriateness of the assumptions in practical applications
- Communicate solutions effectively and efficiently to a critical audience of non-specialists
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Reading List
Selected articles from academic journals and chapters from the following books:
- Tadelis, S. (2013). Game theory: an introduction. Princeton University Press.
- Watson, J. (2013). Strategy: an introduction to game theory. WW Norton.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
1. Knowledge and Understanding
On completion of the course students should be able to:
- Identify strategic situations in which different agents have conflicting incentives;
- Understand various non-cooperative equilibrium concepts including Nash equilibrium, subgame perfect Nash equilibrium and Bayesian Nash equilibrium;
- Analyse the consequences of strategic interactions on feasible outcomes and allocations;
- Understand the role of the agents¿ belief and information in strategic situations;
- Describe the implications of basic normative axioms, including efficiency, stability and various notions of fairness;
- Understand various cooperative solution concepts including core, Shapley value and nucleolus and their axiomatic properties;
2. Application
On completion of the course students should be able to apply the game-theoretic knowledge and understanding into various operations and supply chain problems, including
- Price and/or quantity competition between suppliers and retailers
- Inventory problems
- Decision making on outsourcing
- Auction, procurement and decision making on price determination
- Coalitional games and their various applications
- Assignment and matching problems
3. Cognitive Skills
On completion of the course students should be able to:
- Identify the rationale of the assumptions behind game-theoretic models;
- Describe how the assumptions play in a specific model;
- Critically evaluate the appropriateness of the assumptions in practical applications.
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| Keywords | SA-SCAG |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Joosung Lee
Tel: (0131 6)51 1375
Email: Joosung.Lee@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr Peter Newcombe
Tel: (0131 6)51 3013
Email: Peter.Newcombe@ed.ac.uk |
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