ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1691846
This article is part of the Research TopicSmartization and Resilience of Ports and ShippingView all 4 articles
Slot Sharing for Container Shipping Liners Under Service Competition and Demand Uncertainty
Provisionally accepted
- Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
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This study investigates the slot–sharing strategies of two container shipping liners (CSLs) engage in service competition within a shipping market characterized by uncertain demand. We develop a game–theoretic model where CSLs decide whether to enter a slot–sharing agreement and determine their service quality levels. Three typical agreements, namely, transfer–payment, revenue–sharing, and cost–sharing, are examined, with slot– sharing arrangements and transactions are implemented after demand uncertainty is realized. Equilibrium service quality levels and profits under different agreements are derived, and numerical experiments analyse the impacts of key parameters. We find that the transfer–payment agreement generally yields higher profits than the other two but reduces service quality due to diminished competition. Interestingly, we find that slot–sharing does not always outperform no slot–sharing. When service competition is intense and transfer–payment prices are low, the CSLs may achieve higher profits by operating independently. In addition, we demonstrate that slot– sharing can achieve a win–win situation where both service quality and CSL profits improve under moderate service competition and balanced transfer–payment prices.
Keywords: Container shipping liners, Slot sharing, Service competition, Demand uncertainty, Liner alliance
Received: 24 Aug 2025; Accepted: 29 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhou, He, Zhuo and Wang. 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: Xiaopo Zhuo, zhuoxp3@mail.sysu.edu.cn
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