Coopetition with Frenemies: Towards Modeling of Simultaneous Cooperation and Competition

Actor and goal modeling frameworks are concerned with the analysis of social phenomena and a number of notations and techniques have been proposed for depicting social behaviors. However, coopetition, which is a specific type of social interaction, has not been explored in the actor and goal modeling literatures. Coopetition, which refers to simultaneous cooperation and competition, has been studied extensively in the social sciences where conceptual theorizing and empirical fieldwork have established it as a prominent field of research. It is regularly observed in dealings between many kinds of organizations and institutions, such as businesses and governments, where it has been analyzed at both interas well as intra-organizational levels. Coopetition modeling ought to refer to actor and goal modeling because goal alignment/convergence can yield cooperation among actors while goal conflict/divergence can lead to competition among actors. In this paper we (a) present an overview of academic research into coopetition, (b) discuss the requirements for representing strategic coopetition, and (c) propose future work that will be relevant for the modeling of cooperation, competition, and coopetition.