Maritime transport chain choice by carriers, ports and shippers

A maritime transport chain is a network over which carriers, ports and shippers are involved in the movement of cargo. This paper formally deduces that the port choice literature is included in the maritime transport chain choice literature. Specifically, it demonstrates that determinants of the port choice by shipping lines and shippers found in the literature and determinants of shipping line and shipper choice by ports are also determinants of maritime transport chain choice. Further, a maritime transport chain is formalized as an equilibrium model. Existence and uniqueness results for the proposed maritime transport chain model are derived. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.