ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1601322
This article is part of the Research TopicChallenges and Opportunities for Decarbonizing the Maritime IndustryView all 10 articles
Optimization of green-pricing strategies for two-sided marine freight platforms with network externality and multihoming effects
Provisionally accepted
- Shanghai Maritime University, pudong, China
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Two-sided marine freight platforms attract massive participation from shippers and carriers through efficient matching of shipping demand and capacity resources. While intensifying market competition has driven these platforms to prioritize greenness level alongside pricing strategies, adopting hybrid revenue models (e.g., commission rate and membership fees), their operational dynamics under network externality and multihoming effects remain underexplored. This paper establishes three platform scenarios (monopoly, competitive single-homing, and competitive multihoming) and investigates the optimization of green-pricing strategies. The results demonstrate that: A monopoly platform maximizes profit under low commission rates, whereas in competitive multihoming scenarios, one platform dominates by strategically sacrificing its rival's profit; High freight rate consistently favors monopolistic platforms regardless of transaction frequency, while low freight rate enables Pareto optimality through single-homing on both sides; When shippers exhibit low sensitivity to greenness level and weak network externalities, competitive multihoming emerges as optimal. These findings provide actionable insights for platform differentiation, green-pricing governance, and sustainable competition in evolving digital freight markets.
Keywords: Two-sided market, marine freight platform, Greenness level, Pricing strategy, Stackelberg game
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 12 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Ji and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wen Chen, Shanghai Maritime University, pudong, China
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