A Fuzzy Logic Enhanced Bargaining Model for Business Pricing Decision Support in Joint Venture Projects

<title>Abstract</title> Project businesses are increasingly emerging and many companies cooperatively participate in various projects by the manner of joint venture (JV) for creating synergistic competitiveness. In a project-based short-term JV, the project tasks of JV parties can be properly allocated based on complementary specialties but the rewards sharing is always a challenge in the bargaining process. For improving the manager's reasoning process of pricing decisions, this paper incorporates game theory and fuzzy set theory for the development of a bargaining model, which can be used to estimate acceptable prices for JV parties in accordance with each party's costs and each party's need for the project's revenue. The proposed decision support model can assist JV companies to understand their bargaining positions and select a bargaining strategy in a systematic and rational manner. Irrational offers and alternatives can also be detected and eliminated during the dynamic bargaining process, so as to maintain right businesses.