An Analysis of the Stability of Hinterland Container Transport Cooperation

Alberto Giudici (), Tao Lu (), Clemens Thielen () and Rob Zuidwijk ()
Additional contact information
Alberto Giudici: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, 3062 PA Rotterdam, Netherlands
Tao Lu: School of Business, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269
Clemens Thielen: TUM Campus Straubing for Biotechnology and Sustainability, Technical University of Munich, 94315 Straubing, Germany
Rob Zuidwijk: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, 3062 PA Rotterdam, Netherlands

Transportation Science, 2021, vol. 55, issue 5, 1170-1186

Abstract: We study cooperation among hinterland container transport operators that may share transport capacity and demand in corridors between inland and sea ports. We model this transportation problem as a minimum cost flow problem and assume that operators share the total cost based on a bargaining outcome, which has been proven equivalent to the Shapley value. To examine the stability of such cooperation, we perform a sensitivity analysis of the membership of the Shapley value (the bargaining outcome) to the core (the set of stable outcomes) by leveraging a novel concept of parametric cooperative games. We obtain closed-form solutions for identical players that explicitly characterize the impact of overcapacity on the stability of cooperation. For more general cases, we develop a computational approach based on parametric optimization techniques. The numerical results indicate that our primary analytical result, that is, that overcapacity undermines stability, is generally valid, and that overcapacitated networks may permit stable cooperation in only a limited range of settings.

Keywords: hinterland container transport; sensitivity analysis; collaborative transport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2021.1050 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:55:y:2021:i:5:p:1170-1186

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().