Study On Cooperative Development Of China's Transportation Agent Industry Based On Virtual Enterprise Model

With the economy globalization around the world, regional trade has been continuing to expand both in terms of quantity and range. This leads to the diverse demand of transportation services and the function of transportation agent industry is more and more important. However, owing to the ambiguous definition of transportation agent industry and poor service quality, transportation agent industry does not satisfy the demand of transportation market. And its status is doubted and not understood. Even in some developed countries, transportation agency is to be cancelled to decrease the trade tache of transportation process. Therefore, it is very important to clarify and thoroughly analyze the formation of transportation agent industry mechanism and definitude the independent role of transportation agent industry. Research in this area not only helps to unify the role and use of transportation agencies of transportation market for all parties involved but also a new attempt to transportation agency studies.As one of the largest trade market in the world, China has been expanding its trade especially after its entry into WTO and it has an increasing demand to transportation agent industry. However, in comparison with their counterparts in other countries, China's transportation agents are at a very low level in scale management. It is very difficult for China's transportation agents to compete with their rivals.Therefore, it is an undoubtedly significant issue to study how to grasp the opportunity, meet the challenge and promote the development of China's transportation agent industry. Research in how to enhance the scale management level of China's transportation agent industry through cooperation so that they could compete with their foreign counterparts will make great contributions both to theory and practice. To realize this purpose, this dissertation puts forward the establishment of the cooperative development model, the transportation agents as leaders and based on the alliance of virtual enterprises.To illustrate the independent status of transportation agent industry in the transportation market, this dissertation analyzes the formation of transportation agent industry with the theory of transaction cost economics, information economics (including Principal-agent Theory), the theory of scale economics, and the theory on labor division. The dissertation comes to the conclusion that the internal impetus that contribute to the separation of transportation agent industry from traditional businesses is that independent transportation agent industry has all kinds of scale benefit and the external impetus is transaction cost reduction which brings for the transportation proxy user. The formation of transportation agent industry seems to be the result of the interaction between the division of labor and the market scope expansion, but its ultimate cause is the role of transaction cost. Therefore, this research argues that transportation agent industry should take an independent industry position in transportation market, which provides theoretical evidence for the independent development of our transportation agent industry.This dissertation identifies that 90 percent of Chinese transportation agent enterprises are small-scaled, which lack the modern cooperation-for-competition management philosophy and can not take advantage of network-level operation. In order to enhance...