Research On The Hoarding Effect Of Cargo Booking Decision-making In Port Supply Chain

Global economic integration has entered a new era of building global free trade market,the port plays an important role in promoting this process.With the guidance of supply chain theory,the port supply chain is formed through the systematical integration of port upstream and downstream business nodes.The Hoarding Effect has been recongnized as one of the most problematic issues to be faced in port supply chain management.It not only indicates the vulnerability of port supply chain systems to external interference,especially the demand fluctuations,but also imposes great human,financial and resorce burden on supply chain participants.It is clear that studying the endogenous dynamical mechanism and dynamical characteristics of hoarding effect will not only improve our understanding of port supply chain operations but also provide some theoretical basis for policy making.This research project employed laboratory experiment to study booking behavior in contexts of multi-echelon port supply chain.This study focus on two factors which are important to hoarding effect.The two factors are demand distributions and the cost of changing order amount.The main contribution of this thesis is to investigete the mechanism of demand distributions and the cost of changing order amount contributing to hoarding effect.Based on various sources of literature in port management,supply chain management,this thesis summarized the definition,structure and the characters of port supply chain,and also developed the operation model of port supply chain which contains a shipyard and a shipping company.Following the basic model,this thesis include 4 experiments,of which two are demand distributions experiments,others are the cost of changing order amount experiments.Through designing experiments,programming experiments,conducting experiments,analyzing the data,and got the results.The basic model has the setting of lead times which could lead to hoarding effect but the two-echelon simplified supply chain structure,demand distributions have a predictable seasonal component and the cost of changing order amount could ease the decision burden of participants to smooth orders so that to avoiding the hoarding effect.