Contemporary Liner Shipping Business : A Game Theoretical Application

Abstract

The shipping industry is known for providing transportation service at sea in terms of deploying vessels and accessing ports, making the shipping service itself one of the network-based services. From the perspective of traditional as well as neo-economics, the shipping industry is assumed to pursue profit maximization under the constraints of scarce resources, e.g. capital, assets, seafarers, or binding constraints derived from schedules, etc. In addition, in case that we are looking at the liner shipping business from the perspective of games, more and more players are getting involved in the shipping industry and most of them are becoming rational considering interdependencies among them. In other words, players do not only focus on their own businesses. Taking into account their interdependencies and inter-relations, game theory provides a meaningful possibility to model and analyze the behaviors of the involved players in the liner shipping industry. The players in the liner shipping industry could be some or any of the following: linkage operators, e.g. liner shipping carriers, port operators, freight forwarders, customs, hinterland haulage carriers, inland navigation carriers, market regulators, etc. Generally speaking, liner shipping carriers and seaport/dry port operators are main players who operate the links and nodes, respectively. This thesis provides a well-groomed research on the liner shipping business, and some part of the analysis applies game theoretical approaches for vertical and horizontal cooperation among the links and nodes in the liner shipping industry.