Equilibrium and incentives for supervisor–postgraduate collaborations: A game-theoretic approach

¹ School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026 Anhui, PR China
² Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies, Faculty of Business, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

^* Corresponding author: juzhi.zhang@polyu.edu.hk

Received: 29 January 2018
Accepted: 4 September 2018

Abstract

In most universities, supervisors collaborate with their postgraduate students in writing papers. As a consequence, the relationship between supervisors and postgraduates in the collaborative work becomes the most important one among various relationships between them. In this paper, using a game model, we show that in the current educational system of China, there is a dilemma between supervisors and their postgraduates for their collaborative work – in most cases, either the supervisor or the students will not spend any effort in their joint work. After that, we also investigate whether the two common incentive strategies, i.e., (i) incentives to students, and (ii) incentives to faculties, can solve this dilemma. Our results show that a university can solve the problem by either (i) just using strong incentives to postgraduate students, or (ii) by using a combination of a normal incentive to students and a strong incentive to faculties. Also, we find that when the incentives to the students and to the faculties are below a certain level, all incentives will be just in vain – neither can they improve the serious relationship between supervisors and their postgraduates, nor can they improve the paper quality.