This paper deals with two interrelated questions, namely the optimum size of a shipment, (including the question of the size of a haulage vehicle or vessel), and the structure of transport costs. The relationship between these two questions has not been coherently dealt with previously in the literature, and the heuristic attempts at doing so, have lead to both theoretical and empirical anomalies. This paper adopts an inventory approach in order to show that both of these questions can be treated in a unified manner and this allows us to show, first, that under very general conditions the optimum size of a vehicle or vessel increases with respect to the haulage distance and haulage weight, and second, that the observed structure of transport costs with respect to the haulage distance and quantity is itself a result of this optimisation problem.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by European Regional Science Association in its series ERSA conference papers with number
ersa98p488.