Ship Investment Risk Decision-making Research

International shipping business is a service industry with huge capital and high investment risk. Investing ships, one of the important contents of the business of shipping enterprises, is quite strategic as it concerns the general operation of shipping enterprises and the changes of their fleet structure and transportation capability. It will cast direct influence not only on the whole process of management from purchasing ships to operating them, but also on the future business profit of shipping enterprises.Due to the fact that shipping markets are enormously affected by world economy and international trade, and that ship investment has such characteristics as big capital occupation, long profit-gaining period and many indefinite elements, any project of ship investment will have large risk, which is, in many cases, unpredictable. Therefore it is very necessary to make analysis on the projects of ship investment by using scientific and appropriate means of analyzing risks. In the management of modern shipping enterprises, various potential risks of ship investment projects should be recognized, approximated and assessed before final decision is made.Under the guidance of the ideas above, this thesis will first have a general look at the theories and practice of the decision-making of ship investment risk both inside China and abroad, then make researches on the classification of ship investment risk, the elements that affect it and the means of decision-making, and finally, by making use of the Effect Theory, Bayes Risk Decision-making Theory and multi-attribute Decision-making Theory, establish a Bayes Risk Decision-making Model of ship investment. The principle of this model expects the minimum Bayes risk value. And the model will take price of transportation, cost of transportation per unit and cost of capital, the three major elements that influence the gain of ship investment, as the decision-making attributes. The last step is to test the model by listing practical examples, the result of which will demonstrate that it can enormously enhance the accuracy of the analysis tomodify the previous decision-making by using new information.The thesis aims at coming up with a new approach to investment decision-making under risks so as that the investors will be able to better bring the investment risks under control. And it hopefully provides the shipping enterprises with beneficial references in terms of the business of ship investment.