This thesis consists of three essays on ocean container shipping management. In the first essay, we study the cost sharing and pricing issue in a two-port shipping market with one carrier and two forwarders. The Stackelberg leader carrier authorizes two forwarders to collect cargoes at different ports and then transports laden and empty containers. We first build a model to investigate the carrier’s optimal cost sharing and pricing strategy. We find that the carrier will transfer all the empty container repositioning (ECR) cost to the forwarder of low demand if imbalance exists and transfer all the ECR cost to the forwarder in the high unit ECR cost direction otherwise. As a result, the forwarder who completely takes the ECR cost will have less profit compared to the model witho...[ Read more ]

This thesis consists of three essays on ocean container shipping management. In the first essay, we study the cost sharing and pricing issue in a two-port shipping market with one carrier and two forwarders. The Stackelberg leader carrier authorizes two forwarders to collect cargoes at different ports and then transports laden and empty containers. We first build a model to investigate the carrier’s optimal cost sharing and pricing strategy. We find that the carrier will transfer all the empty container repositioning (ECR) cost to the forwarder of low demand if imbalance exists and transfer all the ECR cost to the forwarder in the high unit ECR cost direction otherwise. As a result, the forwarder who completely takes the ECR cost will have less profit compared to the model without cost sharing. Therefore, we build another two models to motivate all the players to accept the ECR cost sharing policy. We also conduct some numerical analysis to compare all these models. We find that there is a salient conflict between profit maximization and ECR minimization.

In the second essay, we study the pricing and competition issue in a shipping market with carriers providing services between two locations. Shipments are classified into two categories: goods and waste. Trade imbalance allows low-valued waste to be shipped at bargain rates. If imbalance persists, empty containers must be repositioned from a surplus location to a shortage location. Carriers decide prices, which will affect the demand. We build a monopoly and a duopoly model to find the optimal pricing strategy for carriers. We also analyze how the profit of a carrier is affected by price sensitivity, cost structure and competition intensity.

In the third essay, we study the speed optimization and fleet deployment issue with transit-time-sensitive demand for the liner shipping companies providing service both within and outside the Emission Control Areas (ECAs). We first build a model to find the optimal sailing speeds when ships sail inside and outside the ECAs. Based on this result, we then study the optimal transit time and number of containerships deployed for the liner shipping companies when the demand is a decreasing function of the transit time. We also study the case when the carrier has different types of ships.