Sistema de apoio à internacionalização de PMES com recurso à teoria dos jogos

Abstract

Whenever an internationalization process begins, companies are exposed to a lot of risks and uncertainties. In certain cases, during the planning phase, smaller companies may not have the same amount of resources that a large company has in order to analyze and calculate the risks of context, making it even harder for such internationalization to succeed. With that in mind, this paper proposes the development of a decision support system for the internationalization of SMEs (small and medium enterprises), using game theory model, which calculates the profit obtained by the companies according to the different price strategies adopted. From the strategies generated, the tool searches for the Nash equilibria present in this set. For that, we studied some models in the literature that calculates the market share according to the price strategies of the different companies present in the competition and also defined a model that corresponds to the needs of a game theory model. Furthermore, the input parameters that were needed for the tool and the way and representation that the result would be generated and shown to the user were defined so, finally, the implementation of the tool could begin. For the analysis and discussion of the results obtained by the tool, we used a practical case where a Portuguese company that produces olive oil intends to internationalize to a market in a region of Brazil. Through the example we observed situations in which the developed tool could help in a market analysis. We concluded that with the results obtained with the developed tool, it is possible to get a better panorama and understanding about the best strategies, as well as a forecast for each of the possible scenarios analyzed, giving one more resource to those who will make an internationalization decision.