Research On Green Strategies Of Competing Risk-averse Ocean Carriers Under The Low-carbon Background

Maritime transportation has always been an important mode of transportation in international trades.Due to its large scale and high growth rate in recent years,the environmental problems caused by it have been gradually paid attention to.Governments and third-party agencies have issued various regulatory plans related to the green environmental protection of the shipping industry,and the growing public awareness of environmental protection has also created requirements for the green operation of marine shipping companies(carriers).Carriers have to actively respond to the above-mentioned green pressure and choose appropriate strategies for green transformation.It also needs to consider the complex environment in the shipping market when the carriers choose green strategies,such as uncertain factors and risks,fierce competition,etc.,which brings great challenges to carriers.Based on this,this dissertation focuses on the competitive marine carriers under green pressure and explores the problems and challenges encountered by carriers in the process of green transformation through the investigation of the current practice and research status.This dissertation analyses the above research problems from the perspectives of operations management,marketing,and other disciplines,uses game theory,behavioral economics,operations research,and other methods to build research models,analyzes the green strategies of competitive carriers in uncertain environments and the corresponding tariff setting plans.The main research contents of this dissertation are as follows.First,this dissertation analyzes the impact of green technology investment strategies on risk-averse shipping companies in a competitive market with uncertain demand.It is assumed that there are two asymmetric carriers competing with each other in the market,the larger one pays more attention to social responsibility and tends to invest in green efforts to reduce environmental emissions,the smaller one has a capacity restriction.By building a Nash game model,the impact of green investment on freight rates and earnings of carriers is analyzed.The results show that when considering green investment,carriers have different forms of optimal freight rate decisions,which depend on their risk attitudes and capacity.In addition,a carrier’s risk attitude can lead to lower marginal returns,but potentially higher total profits.The green activities of the carrier will prompt it to set higher freight rates,but in some conditions,it has a negative impact on its earnings,and instead helps its competitors to improve the profits.Secondly,consider the carrier’s green investment as an endogenous variable,focus on carrier’s optimal green investment strategy and the competitor’s response strategy.At the same time,this dissertation further analyzes the impact of various factors,such as risk-averse attitude,competition,and demand uncertainty,on the green investment of carriers and the corresponding freight rate decision.It was found that the risk-averse attitude hinders carriers from investing in green efforts.In addition,green activities will have different effects on the competitive environment,namely the expansion effect and plunder effect.Depending on the combination of these two effects,carriers may benefit or lose from their competitor’s green activities.The competition will further magnify these two effects.In a highly competitive market,green investment is more likely to cause losses to carriers,and may actually reduce social welfare.Further,according to the characteristics of green investment strategy,considering the uncertain operational costs brought by green technology investment,the green investment strategy of risk-averse carriers and the corresponding freight rate decision under the uncertainty of green technology are analyzed.Assuming that more thorough green equipment/technology upgrades will generate uncertainties,this dissertation compares two situations of investing in green equipment/technology and not investing in green equipment/technology,then obtain the conditions under which competing carriers will invest in green efforts.The impacts of different market factors on carriers’ strategies are also analyzed.The results show that the uncertainty of green technology and risk attitude are the key factors that affect whether the carrier invests in the green equipment,and the cost of green upgrades will affect the level of the carrier’s green investment.In addition,after considering the technology uncertainty,the impact of risk aversion on the freight rate is opposite to that under the demand uncertainty environment.Besides the plunder effect and the expansion effect,the technology uncertainty also brings the risk effect to the green investment.Different combinations of these effects may result in a win-win result for both carriers.Finally,this dissertation considers the impact of potential green regulation in the maritime shipping market,and analyzes the joint effect of green technology uncertainty and green regulation uncertainty.In addition,the green strategies of carriers are divided into operational measures and technical measures.Then the dissertation studies the competing carriers’ selection of different types of green strategies from the perspective of customer preferences and carriers’ service differentiation.Specifically,taking the slow steaming strategy as the representative of operational measures,and the green equipment upgrade strategy as the representative of technical measures,four sub-games are constructed according to the strategy profile of carriers,and the sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium of the two-period game is obtained.It is found that,when considering the competition and service differentiation in the shipping market,uncertain green regulation generates three effects on carriers,namely penalty effect,competitionalleviation effect and competition-aggravation effect.When the competition-alleviation effect dominates,regulation may benefit all carriers in the market.The final equilibrium situation is that when the probability of green regulation is low,both carriers will adopt slow steaming strategy,when the probability of green regulation is higher than a certain level,the two carriers tend to take different green strategies.Due to the impact of service differentiation,it is difficult to incentivize all carriers to take green upgrade strategy at the same time by the general green regulation.This dissertation comprehensively analyzes the impact of factors such as green emission reduction,uncertain environment,market competition,and risk-averse attitude on carriers’ strategies and profits.The results can provide insights for the governments and some third-party organizations.