Pricing Competition For Ocean Container Transportation With Heterogeneous Carriers And Empty Container Repositioning

With the development of global economic integration,container transportation has obviously become the main means of transportation in international trade.With the continuous expansion and development of the economic scale of port groups in various countries,it will also bring a variety of problems to the shipping market.Among them,due to the unbalanced development of global interregional trade,and the lack of empty container transportation planning of port groups and carriers,most of the empty containers in ports are overstocked,and the problem that they can't be transported on time is the very common and difficult situation faced by the current maritime container market.The cost of empty container repositioning will bring considerable cost burden to the operation of the carrier company,which will also hinder the development of the carrier's shipping.Therefore,how to effectively and reasonably use the empty containers in the port,realize the timely transportation of empty containers and reasonable turnover are very important for the development and operation of China's shipping industry and even the global port groups and carriers.For the good operation and development of carriers,this paper mainly studies the price competition of two different types of shipping carriers in the shipping system which provides container transportation services between two ports.And the cost of empty container repositioning is considered as the factor of price competition.From the perspective of game theory,we use Hotelling model,and add empty container repositioning cost into the objective function.And we establish the objective function with the minimum cost of two carriers.The equilibrium solutions of the two shipping carriers in homogeneous and heterogeneous conditions are derived.In addition,we fully analyze the potential demand imbalance and the impact of various cost parameters on the equilibrium decision-making through mathematical analysis.The results show that when the trade imbalance increases,the large-scale carriers(carrier with low operating cost and perfect development)can carry more empty container repositioning capacity than the small-scale carriers(carrier with high operating cost).Meanwhile,the aggravation of carrier's difference can increase the total profit of two carriers in the same port group,but it is disadvantageous for the small-scale uncompetitive party.Finally,according to the full text and the results of numerical analysis,we put forward management suggestions in line with the layout of maritime transport planning.