Study On The Decision Of Forwarder In Dual Markets Under Empty Container Reposition

As the global economy escalating, international trade is becoming more and more important to the state economy. Container traffic has become the main way of shipping in the international trade. Due to unbalance demand of ports and international division of labor and International industrial transfer and other reasons, empty container repositioning problem has increasingly become notable. Because of a great large amount of empty container repositioning cost, not only in reality but in theory it has attracted more and more attention.In the situation where the contract market and spot market coexist we study the effect of repositioning cost on the decisions and revenues of forwarders. Firstly, we study the decisions of forwarders under the circumstance when market demand follows normal distribution. We find that the decisions of forwarders in the executive stage is restrained both by relative value of executive price and spot market price and reserve quantity and demand. We obtain the optimal reserve quantity of forwarder which the decreasing function of contract transaction price. Compared with executive price, the optimal reserve quantity is more sensitive to reserve price. Furthermore, we discuss the stability of optimal revenue. What is interesting is that the relative value of reserve price will affect the optimal reserve quantity and the optimal revenue and also the stability of optimal revenue. Another interesting conclusion is the bigger of the optimal revenue the more unsteadiness it is. The market volatility has effect both on optimal reserve quantity and optimal revenue and also the stability of optimal revenue. As the volatility increasing, the optimal revenue will decrease and the optimal reserve quantity will become far away from the mean of market demand, however, the optimal revenue will become steadier.And then, we further study the effect of empty container repositioning cost on the decisions and revenues of forwarders. We come to the conclusion than if the repositioning cost will not lead to the decrease of forwarder in the port where the market demand is more than the other, the forwarder will meet all the market demand, and so the decisions of the forwarder will not be affected by the repositioning cost. In another case, if the repositioning cost will lead to the decrease of forwarder, the forwarder will only meet portion of the local market demand, and so the decisions of the forwarder will be affected by the repositioning cost. Its reserve quantity will decrease. However its revenue will become bigger. The application of these conclusions is demonstrated through numerical example and simulation.