Constructive and blocking power in marine logistics

Transport industry in economy had been studied for many years, however, only recently researchers have begun to widely apply concepts of cooperative game theory to optimize costs and profits which are incurred in hauling. Today a wide range of cost/profit allocation methods have become a trend in transport segment, particularly in logistics operations. The most of these methods based on cooperative game theory consider the effect of collaboration (cooperation) which means the integration of companies as a key way to share transportation costs or profits. This study aims to contribute to this area of research by exploring different allocation methods such as the Shapley value, the nucleolus and some other excess based solution concepts of transferable utility game (TU game). In this work we overview existing studies on the subject and consider methodology of cooperative game theory. Further, we calculate numerical example of three shipping companies based on real data. In order to compare profit sharing results we compute the set of allocations and examine the constructive and blocking power of coalitions. The importance and originality of the work are that it explores the new field of application of game theory in logistics which can provide additional insights in this research area.