Regional container port competition in a dual gateway-port system

Abstract

Many ocean transportation hub systems consist of two container ports that share the container handling business in the area. The container flow passing through a port is the main measurement of the port’s competitiveness. In this paper we adopt a Hotelling model to study the container port competition in a so-called “dual gateway-port system”. The system contains two ports and two terminals, one belonging to each port. The two governments in which the two ports are located compete on cargo fees and the two terminals determine service price and service quality. We study two models with different levels of competition between the terminals. In the first model, the two terminals are owned by two different operators and in the second model, the two terminals are centralized under one operator. The second model exists in practice but is not well studied in the literature. We derive the cargo fee, terminal service price, and service quality equilibria for these two models. We investigate the competition outcome sensitivity with a numerical study. The numerical results reveal that governments prefer terminals to compete with each other. If the terminals do not have competitive advantages in their service quality, then terminal centralization brings more profits to the terminal operator than the competition case.