On stability of collaborative supplier selection

This note discusses the possibility of fair gain sharing in cooperative situations where players optimally partition themselves across a number of alternative channels. An example is group purchasing among a set of buyers facing with a range of suppliers. We introduce channel selection games as a new class of cooperative games and give a representation of their cores. With two channels (suppliers), the game has a non-empty core if the gain functions across every individual channel is supermodular. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.