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Port selection from a hinterland perspective

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Maritime Economics & Logistics Aims and scope

Abstract

The studies investigating the port selection process had one thing in common: they analyse the declared preferences of the port agents. However, it is difficult to identify the relevant variables in this process because of the heterogeneity of this group. In this article, we suggest to study the port choice through revealed port selection instead of asking port stakeholders about the main factors in port selection. We propose to analyse the actual inter-port traffic distribution from a holistic view using the hinterland perspective and the discrete choice modelling approach in order to answer the question: Does the location of a port still remain important in port selection? As a case study, we use the Spanish inter-port container distribution among the main peninsular ports.

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Notes

  1. We observe that the value of the Cramer coefficient V for the model with only the distance is better than the corresponding for the better model from the point of view of the likelihood. The reason for this is the Maximum Likelihood Estimators (MLE) are efficient and asymptotically unbiased but not robust, so they can be strongly influenced by outlier observations, as it is the case in this article.

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Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this article was presented at the 2007 IAME Conference. We thank all comments from the reviewers and the participants at the Congress. We also thank José Ángel Vallejo-Pinto, professor in the Computer Science Department at the Oviedo University (Spain), for his technical support. Financial support from the Government of Spain and FEDER, under project MTM2008-06778-C02-01, is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Economics, University of Oviedo, Av. del Cristo, s/n., Oviedo, 33007, Spain

    Lorena Garcia-Alonso

  2. Department of Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science, University Miguel Hernández, Avda. de la Universidad, s/n., Elche, 03202, Spain

    Joaquín Sanchez-Soriano

Authors
  1. Lorena Garcia-Alonso
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  2. Joaquín Sanchez-Soriano
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lorena Garcia-Alonso.

Appendix

Appendix

The system of first derivatives of the log-likelihood function (6) is given by the following expression:

The Hessian matrix is given by the following expressions of the second derivatives of the log-likelihood function:

where

Some nice mathematical properties of our multinomial logit conditional model are the following:

  1. 1

    Multiplicative scale changes in the traffic flows, y ij i∈R and j∈P, do not modify the solutions of system (A.1). Therefore, the estimation of the parameters in our model does not depend on the particular way of measuring the traffic flows.

  2. 2

    Multiplicative scale changes in the distances by a constant k modify the solutions of system (A.1) in the following way: the value of the a j s are the same and the new value of d is obtained dividing by k.

  3. 3

    If (a1, a2, …, a p , d) is a solution for system (A.1), then (a1+k, a2+k, …, a p +k, d) is also a solution for system (A.1).

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Garcia-Alonso, L., Sanchez-Soriano, J. Port selection from a hinterland perspective. Marit Econ Logist 11, 260–269 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/mel.2009.9

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