Product Overview

This three-stage simulation game exposes participants to dilemmas of collective value creation and individual value capture in alliances. In pairs, the participants decide whether to collaborate with one another in assigning engineers to a project of developing autonomous vehicles. The participants play one of two roles: they are either executives for Autonomous Motors (AM, a car "hardware" company) or for Motherboard Chips (MC, a chip "software" developer). The two companies need to allocate engineers to an alliance aimed at developing cars with Level 4 autonomous driving. A participant's payoff depends on their repeated decisions to commit engineers to the alliance as well as on the decisions of their partner. Stage 1 involves decisions to allocate engineers to the alliance project over 3 quarters. Stages 2 and 3 are completed in 10 quarters. While playing stages 1 and 2, the students are given the information about their own payoffs, but not of the partner. Stage 3 offers information about the partner's payoffs as well. The simulation is accompanied by two participant handouts: UVA-QA-0923H1 presents the participant instructions, which can be distributed at the beginning or prior to the simulation; and UVA-QA-0923H2 presents the pay-off matrices which are distributed at stages 1 and 3, as the teaching note explains.