Proposed a model to evaluate supply chains sustainability efficiency based on trade-offs among sustainability goals using game theory

Supply chain sustainability is necessary for businesses today, so organizations pay attention to social and environmental goals in addition to economic goals. Therefore, to ensure the realization of these goals, measuring the sustainability efficiency of the supply chain is considered inevitable. The problem of assessing the performance of supply chain sustainability, on the one hand, is affected by the inherent conflicts of interest among sustainability goals, which increase the complexity of the problem, and on the other hand, it should be configured in a way that can simultaneously provide sufficient knowledge of the efficiency of overall supply chain sustainability and sustainability goals. In this study, a combined mathematical model of data envelopment analysis and game theory is presented to evaluate the sustainability efficiency of the supply chain and the efficiency of sustainability goals by considering the trade-offs among sustainability goals. The trade-offs among sustainability goals are formulated using the Nash bargaining game in such a way that the ability to provide simultaneous results is related to the overall efficiency of supply chain sustainability and the efficiency of each sustainability goal. The proposed model was evaluated under a case study for appraising the efficiency of supply chain sustainability of an Iranian pharmaceutical company. The results of the model implementation indicate that the proposed model is firstly capable of simultaneously providing efficiency values of supply chain sustainability and each sustainability goal, and secondly, it provides the necessary and sufficient knowledge in comparison of these values for efficient and inefficient products.