chain invest in R&D activities to increase the quality of the final product. It is shown that the replication of the … upstream R&D effort or product quality itself. The possibility of relying on R&D figures appearing in the upstream firm …'s balance sheet is desirable as quality enhancement might not be observable or verifiable. …

described along with their strategic variables, which include quality of the components and, in the case of the firms, the … quality of the assembly process itself. The governing equilibrium conditions of the supply chain network are formulated as a …

's quality, and a higher quality leads to a lower failure rate and therefore a lower penalty cost. Another benefit of a higher … quality is to gain a larger market share in the competing market. In a multi-agent game-theoretic setting, we characterize the … equilibrium outcomes for this quality competition game, and reveal the impacts of traceability on product quality and welfare of …