Haoyu Wang

Project description

With the increasing number of countries facing the environmental problem, appropriately managing the carbon emission is becoming one of the most urgent targets for the government around the world. At the same time, as the main source of carbon emission, shipping industry is suffering the empty container management issue deeply. Specifically, due to the imbalance of global supply and demand, the empty container accumulation in seaboard terminal has attracted a great attention. Therefore, how to fix the accumulation problem and improve the efficiency of empty container utilization given the impact of government carbon tax is becoming academically valuable and investigable.

To deeply explore the topic, this thesis assumes that two ocean shipping carriers conduct the cooperation with each other in a port area given the impact of government carbon tax. Under the impact of government carbon taxation scheme, two carriers could conditionally share the empty container bilaterally to improve the using utilisation. Two models are introduced in the thesis, which are the centralised and decentralised decision-making model. The centralised decision-making model assumes that two ocean carriers completely work together and always make the optimal sharing strategy given the impact of carbon tax. The decentralised model is more realistic, it assumes that two carriers sign a specific contract to split the container sharing costs or benefits. If the contract is appropriately made, then the profit that two carriers gain in the in the decentralised model can be coordinated with that in the centralised model. Many types can be applied in the coordination mechanism, this thesis applies the buy-back contract and revenue-sharing contract in investigating the impact of government carbon tax on the coordination mechanism. Firstly, by applying a buy-back contract, the system coordination is achieved when the contract is appropriately made given the impact of carbon tax. In this situation, the carbon tax is only a constant parameter. Secondly, the government carbon tax is considered as an exogenous variable to investigate the carbon tax conditions that could coordinate the system by applying a revenue-sharing contract. Lastly, by involving government’s social welfare model, the carbon tax is considered as a decision variable. Both carriers and government form a standard Stackelberg game where the government is the leader and the shipping companies are the followers. The research purpose is not only coordinating the cooperation system by applying the buy-back contract, but it also maximises the government total social welfare.

This dissertation concludes several valuable managerial insights: (1) Both buy-back contract and revenue-sharing contract can be applied to conditionally coordinate the empty container sharing system between two container carrier given the impact of government carbon tax impact. (2) No matter which contract is applied, the carbon tax can significantly affect two carriers’ cooperation and coordination mechanism and it should be constrained within a specific range to guarantee the coordination. (3) Two shipping carriers’ cooperation and coordination can be maintained as well as the total government social welfare is maximised as long as the government appropriately set the carbon tax rate.