Product transportation strategy in the presence of limited shipment capacity and purchase timing
研究了托运人在海运中面临运力限制时，是提前预订班轮运输还是按需租用不定期船运输，发现市场不确定性高时偏好班轮运输，低时偏好不定期船运输，与直觉相反。
In maritime practice, shippers can order shipment capacity before knowing product demand and then transport those products via liner shipping (LS) after observing demand information, or shippers can transport them when needed via tramp shipping (TS) without pre-ordering shipment. We develop a game-theoretic model to analyse these two transportation modes, LS and TS, in the presence or absence of demand and supply shocks such as those occurring in a pandemic. Interestingly, when vessels have a sufficiently small shipment capacity, the shipper prefers LS (TS) when market uncertainty is high (low) if the following is true: (a) the market size is moderate and there are no such shocks, or (b) the market is not sufficiently large in the case of shocks. This conclusion contradicts the naïve belief that the shipper prefers LS (TS) in the case of low (high) market uncertainty. Additionally, when the market is sufficiently large, the shipper prefers TS only if dead freight rate is low and the tramp vessel’s shipment capacity is moderately greater than that of LS. It follows that, due to high freight charges or low profit, the TS mode may not be the shipper’s best choice, even if the transportation demand is very large.