| The liner container transportation is an important mode of transportation in international trade.It is a common trend for carriers to form shipping alliances.It is common for new members to join the original alliance.The risk of acquisitions and mergers in the shipping strategic alliance is important for the stability of shipping alliances.Most of the literatures have studied the stability of shipping alliances through game theory.Although with the intensification of the alliance,the concentration of the shipping market is relatively high,and several major shipping alliances are almost monopolized.However,the shipping market is still the economic form of coexistence between a few shipping alliances and many individual ocean carriers.From a macro perspective of the market,it is necessary to study the shipping alliance structure problem.This is useful for analyzing why some carriers choose a cooperative strategy to form a liner alliance,while others do not.In the context of excess capacity of ships,this paper is based on the carrier-type multimodal transport operator,using the game theory approach to maximize the profit of a single alliance,and studying the alliance structure generation problem with strong equilibrium in the shipping market to find the optimal alliance structure.Considering ocean carriers in the shipping market as a participant in the game,the participant’s strategy is to find the best partners in the market to form a strategic alliance in order to optimize the route service,reduce the deployment of ship resources,and attract more container transportation demand to increase their own profit.This paper proposes a profit distribution method based on cooperation level,which can realize the fair and reasonable distribution of the total profit of the alliance among the participants,and can further increase the total profit of the alliance.For each part of the alliance strategy,in this paper a strong equilibrium coalition structure model of multi-stage process is established,and a multi-stage alliance structure branching algorithm for solving the model is designed.Using the algorithm to solve the problem of generating ncarrier alliance structure,it is found that the grand alliance is not the optimal alliance structure for the shipping market.The sensitivity analysis of ship capacity and cooperation level shows that the increase of ship capacity and cooperation level will lead to an increase in the total profit of the alliance,but both have a strong constraint,and the growth of the shipping alliance’s own profits is also affected by the external market environment.The innovative results of this paper are as follows.Firstly,from the perspective of complete information static game,this paper studies the structure generationin problem for carriers in the shipping market.Using the multi-stage alliance cooperation transportation game approach can help carriers determine how to choose partners to achieve the alliance’s equilibrium state.Secondly,this paper considers the strong equilibrium of the alliance’s profit distribution,and the profit distribution mechanism proposed in this paper can promote the long-term stability of cooperation more effectively. |
