Disaster prevention and strategic investment for multiple ports in a region: cooperation or not

ABSTRACT

With the growth of maritime transportation, seaports have become critical to the world economy as linking nodes between shipping and inland transport. However, the port system is fragile under certain unconventional emergency events. This study addresses the issue of investment on disaster prevention within the port competition context. The present model discusses and compares four situations of different relationships and strategies of pre-disaster prevention between two adjacent ports. Results indicate that both ports increase the disaster prevention investment under the cooperation scenario compared with that in the case of non-cooperation wherein they are complementary ports. Meanwhile, a numerical simulation is conducted to examine the collective and individual rationality of both ports. Although cooperation strategy decreases the total risk cost of two ports, one of the two ports may profit, whereas the other may suffer losses.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-disaster investment
• unconventional emergency events
• port disruption

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [71471162] and NSFC-Zhejiang Joint Fund for the Integration of Industrialization and Informatization [U150920049]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [71471162] and NSFC-Zhejiang Joint Fund for the Integration of Industrialization and Informatization [U150920049].