Cooperation and Competition within Industrial District Networks:
An Agent-Based Approach

Vito Albino, Nunzia Carbonara, Ilaria Giannoccaro
v.albino@poliba.it, ncarbonara@dimeg.poliba.it, ilaria.giannoccaro@dimeg.poliba.it

 
      Industrial Districts (IDs) are characterised by an agglomeration of small-medium sized firms, located into a specific social and cultural geographic area, highly specialised on one or more phases of a production process, and integrated through a complex network of inter-organizational relationships (Becattini, 1989).
      The literature on IDs has widely stressed that the contemporary presence of competition and cooperation is one of the most important feature of the inter-organizational networks within IDs. This is also considered as a critical factor for the IDs' competitiveness (Piore and Sabel, 1984; Porter 1998; Pyke et al. 1992).
      For studying the cooperation and competition behaviours, the related literature has mainly adopted descriptive researches based on the case study more than theoretical studies based on conceptual and analytical models. However, the latter should be more appropriate to analyse the different network models within IDs, so as to provide managerial policies to efficiently and effectively manage the inter-organizational networks within IDs. Furthermore, they could be adopted to identify new and more competitive forms of interactions among the organizations within IDs.
       This is an emerging need, due to the profound changes in the competitive scenario, which are forcing the IDs to explore new management solutions and organizational models and to modify their network structures. With this regard, an important issue is the development and the evaluation of the new e-business models, which are now arising from the adoption of Internet within the IDs (e.g. digital industrial district).
       Therefore, in this paper a conceptual model to study the inter-organizational networks within IDs is proposed. Such a conceptual model is based on a multi-agent system approach (Kwok and Norrie, 1993), which is useful to model both cooperation and competition behaviours (Durfee, 1988). In fact, Multi Agent Systems (MAS) consist in a set of autonomous agents (the single organizations), which share their information and cooperate each other to achieve a global goal while optimising their individual objectives. Cooperation among the autonomous agents is achieved by using negotiation and conflict resolution mechanisms.
       The proposed conceptual model identifies the typologies of agents that interact within IDs, the levels of negotiation among the agents, and the objectives of the negotiation.
Three typologies of agents are defined, namely the firm-agent, the stage-superagent, and the ID-superagent.  A firm-agent corresponds to a single organization that is involved in a phase of the production process. This phase identifies the stage of the supply chain within the ID, which the firm belongs to. A stage can include different firms, which carry out the same production phase. They can compete for the same customer, but also cooperate for common objectives. In this case, the cooperation is carried out by the stage-superagent, to which an optimisation function pertains. When the cooperation involves firms belonging to subsequent stages along the SC (e.g. buyer-supplier), the respective stage-superagents negotiate adopting a given negotiation mechanism. Finally, the ID-superagent is responsible for the cooperation among the different SCs that can be identifying within the ID.
The described agents negotiate at three hierarchical levels, namely the firm level, the supply chain level, and the ID level, pursuing different objectives.
       In the paper several forms of cooperation and competition within the IDs are characterized and analysed adopting the proposed conceptual model. In particular, the identified forms of cooperation are derived by analysing the related literature on IDs and empirical evidences.

References
Durfee, E., 1988, Coordination of distributed problem solvers, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston.
Kwok, A., Norrie, D., 1993, Intelligent agent systems for manufacturing applications, Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, Vol. 4, No.4, 285-293.
Piore, M., Sabel, C.F., 1984, The Second Industrial Divide, Basic Books, New York.
Porter, M. 1998, Clusters and the new economics of competition, Harvard Business Review, No. 76, 77-90.
Pyke, F., Becattini, G., and Sengenberger, W., (eds), 1992, Industrial Districts and Inter-firm Co-operation in Italy, International Institute for Labour Studies, Geneva.