A Research Program for Modeling Strategic Aspects of International Container Port Competition

As national economies globalize, demand for intercontinental container shipping services is growing rapidly, providing a potential economic boon for the countries and communities that provide port services. On the promise of profits, many governments are investing heavily in port infrastructure, leading to a possible glut in port capacity, driving down prices for port services and eliminating profits as ports compete for business. Further, existing ports are making strategic investments to protect their market share, increasing the chance new ports will be overcapitalized and unprofitable. Governments and port researchers need a tool for understanding how local competition in their region will affect demand for port services at their location, and thus better assess the profitability of a prospective port. We propose to develop such a tool by extending our existing simulation model of global container traffic to incorporate demand-side shipper preferences and supply-side strategic responses by incumbent ports to changes in the global port network, including building new ports, scaling up existing ports, and unexpected port closures. We will estimate shipper preferences over routes, port attributes and port services based on US and international shipping data, and redesign the simulation model to maximize the shipper's revealed preference functions rather than simply minimize costs. As demand shifts, competing ports will adjust their pricing (short term) and infrastructure (long term) to remain competitive or defend market share, a reaction we will capture with a game theoretic model of local monopoly that will predict changes in port characteristics. The model's hypotheses will be tested in a controlled laboratory experiment tailored to local port competition in Asia, which will also serve to demonstrate the subtle game theoretic concepts of imperfect competition to a policy and industry audience. We will apply the simulation model to analyze changes in global container traffic in three scenarios: addition of a new large port in the US, extended closure of an existing large port in the US, and cooperative and competitive port infrastructure development among Korean partner countries in Asia.