My Opinion: Sometimes, When Competitors Collaborate, Everybody Wins

(Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT; iStock)

Back in the day, I worked at a smallish company that produced high-voltage power supplies. Although they had a line of standard products, they also took orders for custom equipment. The regular procedure was that each custom project was assigned to one of six engineers who would design it and oversee production and test. There was an atmosphere of competition among the engineers, each checking to see how the other was doing. However, once, when we received a special order from Brookhaven National Laboratory, two of us were assigned to the project: Ben and me.

Perhaps it was because the specs were especially tight — including it being able to survive a 12-inch drop to a hard floor. Ben was one of the best circuit designers I ever encountered, circuit design not being one of my strengths. But he was not so great at overall system design, which was my strength. The bottom line was that not only did it survive the 12-inch drop, but the Brookhaven project engineer wrote a letter to our management commending us for doing such a “fine professional job.”

This memory returned to me when I read an MIT press release titled: “Sometimes, When Competitors Collaborate, Everybody Wins.”

**Ed’s Blog**

After decades of work as an EE, SAE Media Group’s Ed Brown is well into his second career: Tech Editor.

“I realized, looking back to my engineering days and watching all of the latest and greatest as an editor, I have a lot of thoughts about what’s happening now in light of my engineering experiences, and I’d like to share some of them now.”

A team from MIT and ETH Zurich took on the challenge of optimizing a metropolitan train system. The question they aimed to answer was: “When designing a system of train tracks, stations, and schedules in this network, should rail operators assume each entity operates independently, seeking only to maximize its own revenue? Or that they fully cooperate all the time with a joint plan, putting their own interest aside?”

As usual with such questions, the answer is “both.” But these researchers took it a step further — they developed a framework based on a game theory concept known as the Nash bargaining solution to use simulations for finding the optimum mix.

They applied their framework to a simulated transportation network with multiple competing rail operators. It put to test MIT Professor Gioele Zardini’s hypothesis that, “It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you want to invest in your opponent so that, at some point, this investment will come back to you.”

They found that by investing a portion of their budget into some shared infrastructure projects, independent operators could earn more revenue than if they operated completely non-cooperatively. And they also found that it improved regional train services. “This win-win situation encourages more people to take the train, boosting revenues for operators and reducing emissions from automobiles,” said Mingjia He, a graduate student at ETH Zurich. I would personally call that a win-win-win outcome.

“The key point here is that transport network design is not a zero-sum game. One operator’s gain doesn’t have to mean the other’s loss. By shifting the perception from isolated self-optimization, cooperation can create greater value for everyone involved,” she said.

There are two themes here that are worth thinking about. The first goes back to the project I shared with Ben. I’ve experienced a variety of approaches to managing engineering departments. One theory is that to get the best outputs from engineers, you should encourage competition so they will all strive to outdo each other. Another is that the best results occur only when engineers work collectively. My experience showed me that the best results occurred when engineers agreed to share the workload based on their strengths, not attempting to outdo the others but cooperating as individuals based on their individual strengths and not just an arbitrary grouping based on titles or seniority.

The other theme is that the same approach applies when dealing with complex systems including, but not limited to, metropolitan trains. While each individual seeks to maximize their own benefit, they can only succeed when the individual component is viewed as part of the whole system. The planning tool developed by the researchers at MIT and ETH Zurich illustrates that and provides an innovative way of achieving it.