Cooperation and coordination strategy of the online container supply chain considering service quality competition

As online shipping slot sales has become a trend in the shipping industry, liner companies usually choose horizontal cooperation while cooperating vertically with third-party shipping e-commerce platforms. However, whether the horizontal cooperation is always beneficial for liner companies and the shipping e-commerce platform is questionable considering both pros and cons of horizontal cooperation, especially in the case of fierce service quality competition. This paper studies both the vertical coordinated contract in the online container supply chain and participants' choices toward liner companies' horizontal cooperation strategy considering service quality competition. Game models are constructed to investigate the freight rate, transaction price, and participants' service quality under both centralized and decentralized structures. Results show that the proposed revenue sharing and cost allocation contracts could coordinate the vertical cooperation of participants in the online container supply chain under the decentralized structure. Besides, liner companies' horizontal cooperation strategy is always beneficial for liner companies and is not always bad for the shipping e-commerce platform. It is win-win for them when the coefficient of liner company's marginal service quality cost exceeds a certain value.