Constructive and blocking power in collaborative transportation

Abstract

We empirically investigate constructive and blocking power concepts in transportation planning. Our main question is what do these concepts represent in collaborative transportation. We address it by studying cost allocation and coalition structure problems in a real-world case on forest transportation involving eight companies. The potential savings of collaboration in this case account for about 9 %. We find that players more centrally located tend to benefit from the nucleolus allocation, which takes into account only the constructive power. Other methods, which take into account the blocking power, namely the modiclus and the SM-nucleolus, correct the relative importance of the central players with respect to those in more peripheral areas. The blocking power acknowledges that the more peripheral companies, as a block, are still crucial to the collaboration, despite among themselves they have little opportunities for collaboration. Our main conclusion is that incorporating the blocking power as a criterion in a cost sharing rule for collaborative planning in transportation is important specially in the case where the coalition consists of one or few centrally located companies and several peripheral companies. A method based merely on the constructive power might extremely benefit the central companies, hurting the possibilities of sustaining the coalition.

Analysing the Effect of Partner Characteristics on the Performance of Horizontal Carrier Collaborations

“…Although transportation companies become increasingly aware of the inevitable character of horizontal collaboration, surveys report failure rates up to 70 percent for starting strategic partnerships (Schmoltzi and Wallenburg 2011). While a growing body of collaboration research acknowledges the importance of partner characteristics (Cruijssen et al 2007a;Lozano et al 2013;Guajardo and Rönnqvist 2015;Guajardo et al 2016), no extensive study has been performed on the numerical relationship between specific company traits and the performance of the alliances these organisations are involved in. The main contribution of our paper is thus to provide practical recommendations on which partnership structures may provide the highest collaborative benefits by means of analysing the results of an extensive experimental design.…”

Horizontal collaborative transport: survey of solutions and practical implementation issues

“…Cooperative game theory is the dominant approach (see the two reviews by Nagarajan and Sošić 2008;. With the same goal that is to develop fair rules or models to allocate gain, the papers differ from each other in the constraints or criteria of fairness taken into account, for example additional desirable properties in collaboration (Özener and Ergun 2008), satisfying the coalition budgetary balance (Yilmaz and Savasaneril 2012), the player's stand-alone cost before collaboration (Audy, D'Amours, and Rousseau 2011;Padilla Tinoco, Creemers, and Boute 2017) or bargaining power (Yang et al 2015;Guajardo, Jörnsten, and Rönnqvist 2016), the player's flow characteristics (Palhazi Cuervo, Vanovermeire, and Sörensen 2016) or flexibility in transport (Vanovermeire et al 2014;Vanovermeire and Sörensen 2014b), or the cost of unvisited customers in collaborative routing (Defryn, Sörensen, and Cornelissens 2016). In particular, the Shapley Value based on the player's contribution to the gain is the model which most often proposed in the studies due to its validity and convenience of implementation (Krajewska et al 2008;Dai and Chen 2012b;Vanovermeire and Sörensen 2014a).…”

A survey on obstacles and difficulties of practical implementation of horizontal collaboration in logistics

“…In the article “Constructive and blocking power in collaborative transportation” by Guajardo et al. (), they empirically focus on the negotiation power for companies using game theory models. They concluded that some cost allocation models, such as the modiclus or SM‐nucleolus, could help to maintain the coalition sustainable once they consider negotiation power.…”