An Analysis of the Stability of Hinterland Container Transport Cooperation

Citation: Alberto Giudici, Tao Lu, Clemens Thielen, Rob Zuidwijk (2020). An Analysis of the Stability of Hinterland Container Transport Cooperation. Transportation Science, accepted.

Link: TBA

Abstract: We study cooperation among hinterland container transport operators that may share transport capacity and demand in corridors between inland and sea ports. We model this transportation problem as a minimum cost flow problem and assume that operators share the total cost based on a bargaining outcome, which has been proven equivalent to the Shapley value. To examine the stability of such cooperation, we perform a sensitivity analysis of the membership of the Shapley value (the bargaining outcome) to the core (the set of stable outcomes) by leveraging a novel concept of parametric cooperative games. We obtain closed-form solutions for identical players that explicitly characterize the impact of overcapacity on the stability of cooperation. For more general cases, we develop a computational approach based on parametric optimization techniques. The numerical results indicate that our primary analytical result, i.e., that overcapacity undermines stability, is generally valid, and that over-capacitated networks may permit stable cooperation in only a limited range of settings.