A strategic simulation of corporate competition, supply-chain interdependence and human rights as a global public good.
Participants represent companies operating in the same global production sector. Each company seeks to improve its own competitive position, but it also belongs to a supply chain whose collective performance affects all of its members. At the same time, the decisions of all companies determine the overall level of human rights protection in the market.
The simulation explores a central problem in Business and Human Rights: companies may benefit individually from competitive behaviour while depending collectively on functioning supply chains and systemically on public goods that no single company can provide alone.
Points represent productive and competitive capacity. Their precise narrative meaning may be adapted to the sector selected by the instructor: market share, production capacity, financial performance, technological capability or another comparable form of corporate power.
Each player represents an individual company. Companies compete against one another for relative position and points. They may cooperate with selected companies or use competitive resources defensively or offensively according to the core simulation rules.
Every company belongs to a team representing a supply chain. Members of the same supply chain remain individual competitors, but their collective performance affects the final value of each member's individual points.
The exact number and names of supply chains can be adapted to the class size. Teams should normally contain the same number of companies so that their relative positions are comparable.
The simulation can be played with a single item. That item represents the production sector in which all companies operate. Using one sector keeps the strategic problem visible and makes individual, team and public-good incentives directly comparable.
Companies compete within the global textile and apparel industry, where cost pressure, subcontracting and labour standards create recurrent Business and Human Rights dilemmas.
The same structure can be used for electronics, mining, agribusiness, logistics or another sector with transnational supply chains and identifiable human rights risks.
The simulation distinguishes three levels of strategic interest. They interact, but they do not necessarily point in the same direction.
Each company seeks to maximize its own accumulated points and improve its relative position against all other companies in the sector.
A company's individual points therefore represent its profitability or competitive performance. Relative position matters: being stronger than competitors increases the value of the points already accumulated.
Each company also depends on the performance of its supply chain. The relative position of the team modifies the value of the individual points obtained by every company belonging to that chain.
This produces a collective-action problem inside the team: players may benefit from a strong supply chain while still competing against their own team members and may attempt to free-ride on the efforts of others.
Human rights protection is treated as a public good. It does not belong to one company or one supply chain. Its level is generated by the aggregate effective cooperation of all companies in the simulation.
Effective cooperation may represent common labour standards, monitoring systems, traceability, grievance mechanisms, remediation funds or other collective mechanisms designed to protect human rights across the sector.
Final performance combines individual profitability, the relative strength of the player's supply chain and the global level of human rights protection.
Human rights are calculated from the points assigned to cooperation that actually becomes effective through reciprocal cooperation. Declared cooperation that fails to find a valid reciprocal partner does not contribute to the public good.
This separates the contribution to the public good from the private return obtained through cooperation. Cooperation results may increase the participants' own points, while the effective cooperative investment itself determines the human rights level enjoyed by the entire system.
The instructor may define the exact multiplier bands before the simulation. The important structural feature is that individual position, supply-chain performance and human rights protection all modify the value of individual points without replacing the underlying game logic.
Performance is evaluated at three different levels. These measures deliberately overlap without becoming identical.
The individual winner is the company with the highest final score after applying the individual-position, supply-chain and human-rights multipliers.
Teams can be ranked according to their aggregate or average accumulated points. A strong supply chain benefits its members, but it does not eliminate competition between them.
The global Human Rights Level indicates whether the market has produced a sustainable public good or whether strategic free-riding has generated collective deterioration. A company may therefore win individually in a simulation that produces a poor systemic outcome.
Materials, datasets and results from previous implementations of this simulation will be made available here as teaching experiences are completed.
Previous simulation results and anonymized datasets will be published here.
Coming soonSupporting materials for classroom implementation will be published here.
Coming soon