IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/uctcwp/qt1n42k26q.html

Price and Frequency Competition in Freight Transportation

Author

Listed:
  • Shah, Nilopa
  • Brueckner, Jan K.

Abstract

This paper develops a simple analytical model of price and frequency competitionamong freight carriers. In the model, the full price faced by a shipper (a goodsproducer) includes the actual shipping price plus an inventory holding cost, whichis inversely proportional to the frequency of shipments offered by the freight carrier. Taking brand loyalty on the part of shippers into account, competing freightcarriers maximize profit by setting prices, frequencies and vehicle carrying capacities. Assuming tractable functional forms, long- and short-run comparative-staticresults are derived to show how the choice variables are affected by the model’sparameters. The paper also provides an efficiency analysis, comparing the equilibrium to the social optimum, and it attempts to explain the phenomenon of excesscapacity in the freight industry.

Suggested Citation

  • Shah, Nilopa & Brueckner, Jan K., 2011. "Price and Frequency Competition in Freight Transportation," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt1n42k26q, University of California Transportation Center.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:uctcwp:qt1n42k26q
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/1n42k26q.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Florent Laroche & Ayana Lamatkhanova, 2020. "Effects of open access competition on prices and frequencies on the interurban railway market: evidence from Europe," Working Papers halshs-02930864, HAL.
    2. Zheng, Wei & Li, Bo & Song, Dongping, 2022. "The optimal green strategies for competitive ocean carriers under potential regulation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 303(2), pages 840-856.
    3. Florent Laroche & Ayana Lamatkhanova, 2022. "Effects of open access competition on prices and frequencies on the interurban railway market: evidence from Europe," Post-Print halshs-02930864, HAL.
    4. Zhong, Huiling & Zhang, Fa & Gu, Yimiao, 2021. "A Stackelberg game based two-stage framework to make decisions of freight rate for container shipping lines in the emerging blockchain-based market," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 149(C).
    5. Nicolet, Adrien & Atasoy, Bilge, 2024. "A choice-driven service network design and pricing including heterogeneous behaviors," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    6. Mesa-Arango, Rodrigo & Ukkusuri, Satish V., 2014. "Attributes driving the selection of trucking services and the quantification of the shipper’s willingness to pay," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 142-158.
    7. Wu, You & Lange, Anne & Mantin, Benny, 2022. "Who benefits from air service agreements? The case of international air cargo operations," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 281-303.
    8. Zheng, Wei & Li, Bo & Song, Dong-Ping, 2017. "Effects of risk-aversion on competing shipping lines’ pricing strategies with uncertain demands," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 337-356.
    9. Feng, Fenling & Zhang, Jiaqi & Liu, Chengguang, 2023. "Integrated pricing mechanism of China Railway Express whole-process logistics based on the Stackelberg game," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 609(C).
    10. Mingzhu Yu & Ruina Yang & Zelong Yi & Xuwen Cong, 2020. "Contracting in Ocean Shipping Market Under Asymmetric Information," Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research (APJOR), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 37(02), pages 1-24, March.
    11. Brueckner, Jan K. & Luo, Dan, 2014. "Measuring strategic firm interaction in product-quality choices: The case of airline flight frequency," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 3(1), pages 102-115.
    12. Ge, Jiwen & Honhon, Dorothee & Fransoo, Jan C. & Zhao, Lei, 2020. "Manufacturer competition in the nanostore retail channel," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 286(1), pages 360-374.
    13. Abate, Megersa & de Jong, Gerard, 2014. "The optimal shipment size and truck size choice – The allocation of trucks across hauls," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 262-277.
    14. Tamannaei, Mohammad & Zarei, Hamid & Rasti-Barzoki, Morteza, 2021. "A game theoretic approach to sustainable freight transportation: Competition between road and intermodal road–rail systems with government intervention," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 153(C), pages 272-295.
    15. Lakew, Paulos Ashebir, 2014. "Economies of traffic density and scale in the integrated air cargo industry: The cost structures of FedEx Express and UPS Airlines," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 29-38.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:uctcwp:qt1n42k26q. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/itucbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.