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The cost transportation game for collaboration among transportation companies

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Abstract

In modern transportation systems, the potential for further reducing costs is severely limited. Increased competitiveness through cost reduction can be achieved if there is a collaboration among transportation companies. Participation in such collaboration can benefit all participating companies as a whole, as well as each company individually, by increasing the participants’ competitiveness. In this study, we propose a game-theoretical approach for collaboration among transportation companies in a transportation system consisting of several independent transportation companies. We introduce a new transportation game called the cost transportation game (CTG) and prove that the CTG is a transferable utility game with a super additive characteristic function and a non-empty core. To obtain the core allocations, we introduce the restriction of a feasible solution and theoretically demonstrate that points in the core cannot be expressed only by dual optimal solutions but also by the optimal restrictive transportation scheme (ORTS), which implies that the points in the core can be obtained by solving ORTS and the core allocations can be realized by implementing ORTS. Finally, we present computational results for real-life and artificial instances.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71701221, 72271251), the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Grant No. 17YJC630235), and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (Grant No. 2023A1515010683).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Operations, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 44106, USA

    Shitao Yang

  2. School of Management Science and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400045, China

    Jiangao Zhang

  3. Department of Management Sciences, School of Business, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China

    Shaorui Zhou

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  1. Shitao Yang
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  2. Jiangao Zhang
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  3. Shaorui Zhou
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Correspondence to Shaorui Zhou.

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Yang, S., Zhang, J. & Zhou, S. The cost transportation game for collaboration among transportation companies. Ann Oper Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-023-05466-4

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